In taking its first steps, Leopoldstadt falters slightly. The early acts are set in Ibsen Land: a belle époque continental bourgeoise theatrical context and attendant set of stakes that must be both familiar and appealing to any playwright with a sense of this received tradition. The dialogue in this, the happiest period of the extended Merz family’s life—where they’re still innocent of plot—could generally use tightening. This remains somewhat true for the whole first half. The establishment of one of the play’s through-lines—the family’s relationship with Freud (a member of their spatial, racial and scholastic communities)—is notably vague and uninspiring. For a moment, this made me wonder if I’d be less impressed by Stoppard’s use of other intellectual coordinates if I knew those theories and their contexts as well as I do this example.
While all of this would be better for some attention, none of it ends up mattering much. Leopoldstadt ends up finding itself and becoming a startling play about historical accident, identity and the costs of survival. The final act in particular is one I’ll sit with, with its portrayal of the lasting personal and cultural, and national consequences of gutting losses and smothering estrangements.
This play illustrates so many difficult things so piercingly well. It shows exactly how Ashkenazi communities were inter-related and connected by well-maintained family ties and work: why it seems like everyone Jewish you’ve heard of knew one another in this era. Via a consistently-humming through-line in the background the play also does a good job of illustrating the long history of Palestinian conflict, employing a clear perspective on the deployment of power and agency in the region over the decades which leads you to think about how these forces played out after 1955, in the play’s aftermath.
Leo’s “sorry you had a bad war” line (the phrasing an echo of something Sayers’s Dowager Duchess of Denver says of her daughter Mary after World War I: probably not unique to Sayers, but in circulation in a particular British educational/class set) is excruciatingly spot-on, revealing the prevalent contemporary inability to conceptualise the Shoah as any kind of discrete crisis. It’s something I recognise from having read about the evolving cultural reception of this genocide, but it’s also something I don’t think would occur to anyone who hadn’t lived through that period to include.
Leo is culpable for his shallowness, his cruel distance and wilful forgetting, but he’s simultaneously himself a precipitate of forces that engender his reactions. His whole unaffected persona is a response to trauma: an attempt to turn out the lights when the postman comes, to pretend no one’s home and to return the repressed to sender. Leo is Tom Stoppard’s most obvious representative in the play, but like Blanchot reminds us, every character and element in a dream is of the dreamer, and every character and element in a work is of the writer. There is also something of Stoppard’s palpable survivor’s guilt in the heir to the family business who kills himself because he finds his own survival unjustified in the face of others’ losses.
The play is an unashamed trauma-dump, and uses that effectively. Efficacy is something I think about a lot in this context, given that US Shoah education, aimed squarely at goyim, can shade into torture-porn. The creation and maintenance of the popular memory of the Shoah—what took it from ‘a bad war’ to ‘Never Again’—is a strategic political choice. Yet it’s a choice I’m always unsure about the costs, efficacy, long-term prospects and adaptability of.
In some ways Leo is an annoying send-up, but he does linger. He can’t pronounce his own family members’ names right (“Wilma”). It was so much work, in the mid-fifties, to find out what had happened to anyone in the camps. His aunt must have expended so much energy discovering the dead ends of her family (and is also laden with guilt over a choice she made about visas, which is by no means hers to bear). After all this, the aunt has been successful only twice. One little cousin, and now Leo, her nephew. She finally finds a survivor, and it’s this callow manchild who has no idea what his life means to this family. Leo’s lack of gravitas is infuriating, and shows the cost of survival by means of geographic and psychological flight. He’s almost the last living member of a family obsessed with culture, and yet Leo is unable even to properly call himself a writer. His relationship to art is so facile. And yet that is a front: when reminded of the broken cup, Leo crumples into the chair he sat in when he sliced his hand at age eight—hunched and small again.
Adorno’s dictum “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” hangs undismissibly in the air when this same aunt begins to list off the places where members of the family met their ends. Two in a row are Auschwitz, and then the next isn’t. There’s a queer tension to that rhythm. You know it’s coming: the point in the recitation when the poetic power of three and the logistics of history will inevitability bring you to her ‘Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz’. What does it mean to build the breath-bate rhythm of a poem into these lines, curling around the word? For me, it worked—the dirge-cadence awful, in its expectedness. And then there is the grotesque, listless gentleness of so many members of the family having died in the same place, if not at the same time. Isn’t it something? No one wants to die alone.
On top of these personal deaths, the play is recokoning with the death of the Vienna that centuries of time and cultural labour built: of an important Vienna that still breathed, that meant anything. The play invokes complicated questions of national responsibility and the irreparable harm Vienna did to itself in doing this. The subject is particularly poignant in relation to, for example, Poland’s national rebranding efforts to pretend the Shoah was locally unprecedented, carried out entirely by invaders and an assault to the nation-state, In reality, no one could have been more accommodating to the endeavour than the goyishe residents. After all, it came as something of a capstone to the countries’ own long projects of anti-semitism. Even Poland’s genocide memorials now have a ‘victims of communism’ flavour to them, de-emphasising the victims’ otherness in order to frame the Shoah carried out on Polish land as an aggression against Poland. These monuments give gratuitous space to goyim Polish objectors to the Shoah, as though the point is not the mass death but that some Poles weren’t keen on it.
The loss of Jews—of over 10% of Vienna’s population—in addition to more general war deaths and the aftermath of the Great War, unravelled things that time and numbers cannot piece back together. Vienna will probably never be Vienna again; it’s a museum and a tomb to an empire and a culture, now. And in part—in large part—that too was a suicide.
My partner observed that after this initial staging, the play will probably never be performed in the UK with such a large cast again. There will inevitably be more doubling, rendering ‘who’s who?’ a harder question even than it is in this maiden outing. While the final scene consists of three people in a room, the first is crammed with people. Leopoldstadt is thus not necessarily written for longevity or portability: house casts and standing troupes haven’t been a Thing in the UK since the decline of rep theatre in the 70s and 80s. Mari points out, however, that continental national theatre’s like Greece’s often engage actors for a season and are contractually obligated to provide them with work (or at least pay) throughout that period, even if a show tanks. Such theatres will find the play very suitable to their needs. (Shows tanki differently in the UK, in part because so much money tends to sit in every large-scale production.)
Leopoldstadt also started at seven, a touch early, and ran without an interval. That gave the play an unabated intensity (no ghoulish anticipation of genocide while you enjoy interval ice cream), but I think it might have been done because child cast members are present throughout the play, including at the bitter end. The post-watershed child actor fee is, on purpose (to help protect child actors from exploitation), so eye-wateringly expensive, and the work regulations governing child performers are so strict, that no production wants to retain a child into the night.
In some ways, it’s odd to see this described as Stoppard’s most emotional, humane work, etc., etc. Leopoldstadt’s core preoccupations aren’t really interpersonal, as such. It’s a play at least as concerned with embodied politics and memory, and the psychology and life-stories of states, as with a family. In some respects, it’s larger and colder than many other Stoppard plays. It doesn’t feel that way, though—it’s visceral and lingering, and if it’s humane, it bears a wary ambivalence towards humanity.
– I love learning anything salient about the art of these cultures. The Never Ending Sacrifice sounds like a dynastic webnovel affair, or like the play “A Dream Like A Dream”:
“Inspired by Buddhis[t] principles, the drama unveils its stories by exploring the recurring cycle of life. The entire play is like a grand journey, starting from the end of life, and observes possibilities for people’s liberation from suffering[.]
The play has many unusual aspects. Consisting of two parts, it lasts about eight hours long, which is a big challenge for both the crew and the audience. It’s also an integration of stories happen[ing] in various places and times, with time ranging from the early Republic of China to modern times, place ranging from Taipei, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and Normandie.” (https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514f7859444e31457a6333566d54/share_p.html)
– “We’ll go to my quarters to drink—” Garak finally making his move, eh?
– Odo monitors all Quark’s communications. It’s not legal. Bashir is cool with it, though, because it’s “in the interests of Station Security.” DS9 would let the police state fuck it until it passed out from dehydration. DS9 wants to gag on the police stat’s cock like this is a Taxianjun flashback.
– Odo: Ah, the Obsidian Order. You’ve got to hand it to them—
You do not, under any circumstances—
– Garak has a BDSM ‘pain2pleasure’ machine in his brain.
Katy: Just say ‘sex implant’. Surely the plot is that Bashir has to bang Garak to generate natural endorphins. (She also did fake sniffling for Bashir when Garak suggested they weren’t friends.)
– At last we’re enjoying some confirmation of Garak’s stupid “is he or is he?!” spy status.
– Katy: This replicator looks like a cat face. Maybe Garak just likes cats.
Me: His dad has the same model. I guess this was like, a “you love cats, right son?!” birthday present Garak couldn’t bring himself to get rid of.
– Drug withdrawal!Garak is being a bitch.
– We’re doing some very recycled Brechtian/Malaparte World War II trauma monologuing, but it’s more effective than anything has been for hours and hours of programming. “Reptilian Chalk Circle”. Garak is rather effectively gay; Bashir seems a bit bored.
– Garak and Bashir smarm at each other. Garak tells Bashir about his ex boyfriend and how they betrayed each other, blah blah. It is a fucking weird method of hitting on someone. The true complicating factor, however, is that Bashir is a shiny-leafed houseplant. How can you romance a houseplant? He is a peace lily that successfully cultivated a human form: the most unfuckable creature on this station, Morn included.
– Me: Why does Bashir get to use an official runabout to go bother Garak’s dad?
Katy: Sisko’s very tired. He just let him have it.
– Garak’s hateful dad takes a moment to be a cunt. Also Garak never had an ex boyfriend, ‘Elim’ was always himself; I guess Garak’s been keeping company with Miss Rosy Palm for some years.
– Garak says some dumb shit about how his fake backstories are all true, especially the lies! I don’t know exactly what that’s ripped off from, but it’s absolutely from something else. I can taste imported ham on the wind. Mm. Gabagool.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 23, “Crossover”
– Kira deals with Bashir’s inability to shut the fuck up; Bashir is absolutely unendurable this week. If he were suddenly replaced in every scene by Arnold Rimmer, everyone watching and in the show would praise the great improvement in the ambiance.
– What a relief that the Mirrorverse has opened is yawning space yoni, putting an end to this fucking conversation.
– Mirror Kira: I’m gaaaaay! Can you tell by my loopy louche walk? Only a homoseeeeexual walks in this maaaaaanner!! And I have a tinfoil headband!
Katy: Kira’s found someone she dislikes even more than Bashir: the evil gay version of herself.
– What is that evil headband? What in June Hudson’s holy name??
– Evil Odo hates jokes, which is identical to regular Odo. Both are cops. I see little, if any, difference.
– Evil Kira is super fucking smarmy, but she’s fun.
– Kirk headfucked goatee!Spock into being real good, which is hella cute.
– Evil Kira is so, so into Good Kira—fine. The BingGe/BingMei vibe intensifies, and Regular Kira rides the whirlwind (and herself, probably).
– Kira: who the fuck is ‘Kirk’?? Do you know?
Bashir: Uuuuuh yeah, I fucking. Yes.
– Bashir to O’Brien: Actually [in my world] we’re best friends—
Katy: No you’re not.
– Evil Pirate Sisko has chaotic energy. Idk, it works!
– Evil Kira offers us the most characterisation anyone on this show has yet. Why is the best written episode episode so far???
– Ol’ turtle face Odo almost managing a smile, here.
– House of Duras mentioned!! Ayyyy, the girls and their girls.
– ‘You’re not accustomed to this workload are you?!’ No Chodo, he’s fuckin clarified that already.
– Sisko doin’ a ‘bellion with Smiley. How are these two particular parallel universes so fucking linked and close?? This is like Time 3??
– Katy: I think Kira was LEAST happy to discover that some version of her was fucking Sisko.
– Regular Sisko: Where the fuck have you two been?!
Bashir, in greasy rags:
Kira, in party dress: …well I discovered I’m bisexual?
Sisko: Fucking WHERE, at an avant-garde production of “Rent” in the Delta quadrant??
Bashir, weakly: How we gonna pay…
Dax, clenching fist: Last year’s rent?
– To echo fandom, where the fuck is Mirror Dukat at while Kira sits in his chair? Like, is he a farmer? Are he and Kira finally the Nazi power couple of his dreams? …omfg is he her step dad? Does she call him, Dad? Is that why she’s Like This????
– Katy: I’m watching this whole show so we can get to Trouble with Tribbles II
Me: I’m still on step-dad Dukat making Evil Kira play catch.
Dukat, Nazily: Are ya winning, son??’
Evil Kira: Papa: I am.
– Back in the proper universe, what if Dukat’s five-year strong campaign to bang Kira just ends in Kira/Ziyal? Like, the Justice this has.
– Also I’m sure, just S U R E there’s shitty Ferengi-produced bondage porn about a certain notable Klingon House called “Under Durass”.
– So in retrospect, Crazy Lesbian Week has been the best episode of the whole series so far. It’s also the only episode so far that’s been even a little camp. Like, they suddenly remember that Camp existed, that they were fucking Star Trek, and that they could thus Access the Golden Camp Register, no problem.
– Another thing is, as Star Trek goes on and becomes more interested in its own fandom, it features more and more Really Insufferable Men. TNG lets Barclay creep in, but in Voyager he’s a big old character. DS9 opens the door to Bashir, who’s Arnold Rimmer but it’s not a joke, to Smarmlord Garak, Dukat: the Fun Nazi!, Odo: Boring Gooman, Quark: Small-Time War Crime, O’Brien: Full-Time Racist, the series of processed string cheeses Kira dates (she also nearly dates the Fun Nazi, and does date Boring Gooman, who’s also going steady with: fascism) and Sisko: Forever Mad. After that, it’s just a parade of wankeries. Tom ‘Fuckboi’ Paris, whatever Nelix has going on, the bitchy EMH, Q Is Straight Now. I didn’t like Early Riker, but that beard changed him. Half this cast needs a beard.
– No one on DS9 has a fucking cat, a la Data. Would not happen. On the gritty! frontier!!, no cats. They have Cardassian space rats, and no cats to catch those. And no one’s been like “hey, I want one of those space rats as a pet,” or “I will make these space rats fight, for money.” Wasted opportunity.
Surely weird-ass Dax looks at these things and is like, “they’re so cute!!” as everyone around her winces.
Or Kira’s like, “oh don’t knock ‘em, they’re good eating.” O’Brien whimpering “what do we do about the rats?!” as Kira slides over a selection of pertinent chutneys.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 24, “The Collaborator”
– Katy: Does q ever come back?
Me: …yes.
Katy: Is it… not good?
Me: No. It is not.
Katy: Surprised he could be bothered. Picard’s not here, what’s the point?
– Kira has great bedroom hair this episode. Vedic Barreil, meanwhile, only has a substandard orb experience.
– Kai Winn is here to smarm her way through yet another horrible conversation with Kira, who fuckin sees her.
– Sometimes I remember how good Odo’s actor was in that one scene in Legend, playing an evil swamp monster. What happened to you, Rene?
– Interesting that this collaborator who wants to live out his twilight years on Bajor didn’t come in a better disguise. Or indeed, in any disguise.
– This bitch is gonna finger—yeah I knew it would be Barreil. Whenever Kai Winn says ‘my child’ you just—hurt your jaw with the clenching.
– Kira’s white top with a cut out neck is excellent. I think she’s always wearing it under the uniform top, but it’s no less good for that.
– We get a decent hint regarding Odo’s thing for Kira, here. If I were physically capable of caring about Fash Gordon, that would be nice.
– To make a big public corruption case, I think Kira should seek official authorisation to get this locked data? It would take time, but this is going to be reviewed and subject to considerable scrutiny, and therefore has to be seen to be aboveboard. I don’t think anyone ever gets data appropriately in DS9. There’s some big ‘fuck the rules!!’ energy about how they approach procedure that feels immature and kind of hostile to Star Trek as such. (And if you say “but you can’t make procedure interesting!”, I will print out “Nirvana in Fire” and smother you with its million pages.)
– I can’t remember this episode at all, but Vedek Barreil will have done some shady shit to cover up for Kai Opaka for the good of Bajor in a tense time.
– Barreil has gotten high on the orb, just licking it 4x a week.
– Barreil apparently didn’t Wars Crime to protect Opaka, but rather some villages. It’s not something that can ever look good, even if it made sense at the time. And now Kai Winn will be in charge. And she’s politically the worst. Cool cool cool.
– Kai FUCKING Winn. ‘Feeling the pagh’ like she’s gonna yank Kira’s ear clean off. Israeli-coded Dolores Umbridge is one of DS9’s best contributions to culture.
– Yeah, Barrel was indeed acting to protect Opaka’s reputation, he was just blowing smoke about the villages. Smelled it on the wind. This episode was very good on a plot level but like. It had the nutrients, but no flavour? It was like a Terry Nation script draft before Chris Boucher got to it. No one on this writing staff can plate a dish. What is wrong with these people?
———
DS9 S2 Ep 25, “Tribunal”
– Treated Katy to my ‘screaming cat’ rendition of the DS9 theme; she loved it.
– This next week brought us an actually-decent character interaction between the team members. O’Brien is fussy about the station: I now know something salient about O’Brien. Characterisation occurred. This is a stunning development, for DS9.
– Katy: I hope O’Brien has a nice holiday.
The Cardassians: *board the shuttle*
Katy: …so not a great holiday, then.
– The Cardassian interrogators are making O’Brien strip. Katy agrees, because his shirt is terrible.
– In case you’re wondering, Cardassian prisons, aka Four Lights Hotel, have not gotten more fun since last we saw them. They have not installed better lighting or anything.
– Odo is officially a Cardassian court Nestor, but doesn’t count as a collaborator at any point in the show thus far, because that would be narratively inconvenient, I guess.
– Really glad we’re going further with shit Garak said about Cardassian trials as a social system, doing more world building for this species.
– Why not coerce Garak into helping you understand Cardassian trials? Probably need to lampshade why they’re not asking.
– Odo decent this week. Actually a strong episode.
– Katy and I both think this court set up is a lot like the one in the first episode of Blakes 7.
– This episode sets up nice semantic layering regarding this trial as a public viewing experience, and the show trial as a show (and in so doing, generates some meta-commentary on DS9 as visual entertainment).
– Interesting that the Maquis are slinking in to disclaim ownership of the guy who set O’Brien up.
– Oh my god I love this awful Dickensian lawyer. Great fucking job being the worst.
– Katy is infuriated that the Federation isn’t doing anything about the attempted framing.
– Once again this show doesn’t give a shit about trauma. The last thing I want after torture and near execution is to pretend everything is cool on a spa get away? I want fucking therapy, stat.
– Katy: All kinds of bad stuff has happened to Miles this season!
Me: Is it just that he’s the kind of guy shit happens to?
———
DS9 S2 Ep 26, “The Jem’Hadar”
– The week after O’Brien got kidnapped and tortured on his family vacation, Sisko decides to take a working family vacation. Combination scheduling guys and writer’s room: stagger your episodes, I am begging you.
– Quark is attempting to squirrel his way onto the trip. Sisko is in hell.
Katy: I think he sees the black humour in it.
– Sisko knows Quark is trying to hard sell his billboard scheme.
– Katy hates Sisko’s shirt for being too tight.
– Nog is actually decent at science class.
– “I don’t think I remember you, me and mom ever having more fun together!”
And now, Quark is your new mom!
– Quark camps like the would-be stepmom in Parent Trap.
– Sisko is flirting with Quark. It’s weird.
– Why is this Weyoun being tracked by the Jem Hadar?
Sorry a Vorta, not a Weyoun exactly. Or perhaps she’s just Vorta-looking? Very much so.
– Yeahhhh, bring back the Tulaberry wineeee!
– The Dominion soldiers are mad they’ve only captured a human and a Ferengi, rather than members of a sexier race, like the Klingons.
– Super weird that the Jem Hadar are talking about the Bajorans pejoratively as a Spiritual People? Uuuuuh, your Brand, guys.
The writers’ room has evidently not decided what the Dominion is yet.
– It’s wild that Quark claims the Ferengi didn’t have slavery. Frankly I just don’t believe it? It’s racial capitalism, not racial fapitalism.
It’s possible that at some point Ferenginar executed economic reforms curtailing slavery to feel up mobile labour, end duties of care, create more economically solvent customers and keep the market flowing. Such reforms would probably be aimed at preserving capitalism as such rather than individual capitalists, and undertaken bc slaves aren’t optimal labourers and consumers.
Quark’s speech here is highly lauded and oft-quoted, but nonsensical in world-building terms and totally unearned in the moment. It’s like, Peak collective nostalgia re: the intellectual heft of DS9.
– Nog is wearing cute blue green nail polish.
– Dax is fucking some captain. They hate each other, but it’s a sexy hate.
– Everyone’s off rescuing Sisko. Who the fuck is staying to watch the station??
– Bashir and Kira are back in a shuttle together, but he’s not sexually harassing her anymore. That’s Growth.
– The writing team hasn’t yet decided that Nog is gonna be a good engineer, like his dad. Some of these scenes would have been an optimal time to show the beginnings of that (and retrospectively, it feels actively weird in a Watsonian sense that Nog would be completely at sea in this scene at this age).
– The also-imprisoned ‘not Vorta’ extra of the week is surely marked for death.
– This episode makes great use of the production team’s having the models, graphics and sets for the Enterprise. The lensing is tight to prevent clear 1:1 identification of the two bridges. Excellent capitalising on extant materiel.
– The also-imprisoned girl ‘not Vorta’ is a fucking Vorta! I knewwwwwww.
– Are Vorta usually telekinetic? I don’t remember that coming up in the subsequent presentations.
– Interestingly, this girl doesn’t react to Odo at all. Again, probably the writing team hadn’t yet decided on these elements of the world building. Honestly, script your whole show before shooting. If that sounds crazy from a Western tv production perspective, that’s because Western tv production sets itself up for failures like this. You just wouldn’t see this shit with a 50 episode block-shot Asian drama.
– An entire 500 person ship got totalled in this rescue mission! Hot damn. Okay I checked, it was Galaxy Class, which means a crew compliment of 1,000 to 6,000. Fuck? I hope they mostly disembarked while at DS9, leaving only combat-necessary personnel.
– We’ve now survived season 2! Soon the writing staff will return from TNG/the War.
One more season, and then Worf returns to us. Come, Worf! Come, and make Odo look still blander by standing next to you and having roughly the same Brand (but more noir) (and more fash) (and the same backstory angst, but less nuanced honestly and staler for going second and all-around less fun).
– Kira says she despises Quark, and lists some good reasons. It’d be nice if that attitude was palpable during her interactions with him in previous episodes. As it stands, this feels inconsistent with her slightly-amused tolerance.
– Katy wants it on record that Sisko’s pyjamas are good.
– Katy: I love the Star Trek a-plot, b-plot format. It’s so comfortingly the same, every time.
– Sisko: Vedek Bareil is visiting—
Kira: And I’m out, booty calls!
– Katy: Kira’s gotten a bit awkward, now that the sacred orb told her she was destined to fuck this guy. She can’t even look him in the face any more.
– This script is actually very good. Vedek Bareil still can’t make facial expressions, but the lines he’s failing to emote along with are much better!
– Bareil thought he was gonna get laid, but is thwarted when Kira realises this was all Quark’s long-game plot to distract her with bussy. She then gived Quark a thousand middle fingers, throws his sticky-fingered cousin in jail and runs off to fuck her boyfriend. A Victory for Uppish.
– The prophets somehow neglected to depict Quark’s vital role in getting Kira and Vedek Bareil together. Curious.
– Meanwhile in the A Plot, everybody in a town Odo and Dax visit is a holographic projection created by an elderly, now- dying man. There’s some heavily isekai bullshit wherein the holograms all decide they don’t care who created them, because it’s their shared lived reality that matters. (If the programs have run for years, they may well be sentient? Like they are pushing up against new forms of life, here.)
– Odo becomes a spinning top for a little (holo)girl, and it’s successfully cute. That’s right, for once Odo is not a leaden burden on the narrative. Cherish this precious moment, Odo fans.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 17, “Playing God”
– We’re told that Dax is, historically, a scary Trill symbiote-candidate assassin. (A la Reviewer 2, rather than ‘a murderer’.) To be honest, it’d have worked for me if she was still terrifying in this aspect of her life/work.
– The Cardassian vole is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, so good job, prop guy.
– Every time we go to the Klingon restaurant run by this opera-loving proprietor, it is pretty good. That guy is all right by me.
– Why does this little nerd wanna be a joined Trill? His dad I guess, but he doesn’t want to be here, so.
– ‘You got the station: you’ve got the voles! You could always withdraw—’ Random bitchy Cardassian, you are my favourite.
– This week’s ‘proto-universe!!’ technobabble is w i l d. They’re saying it very seriously, but it’s pretty ?? I think this could have worked better if they’d trusted the audience to hook into the scifi a bit more and played out the explanation, letting it have more narrative focus.
– Quark, a life-ruiner, is here with some ‘life sucks, and then you die!’ advice that comforts no one. This Trill child should have consulted the voles.
– You get the vague suspicion that Trill candidates are raised in a quasi-monastic setting, focused on clean living and high academic achievement. A few sentences to confirm and clarify this would have contextualised Jadzia’s job-shadow kid, and given a shape to his prissiness. (It’s weird that she calls him arrogant early on, when he’s not really done anything yet.) In general it might have worked to retain him for several episodes, giving him a growth arc and Jadzia a relationship with him that meant something.
– I do like that this frustrated child calls Jadzia a ho and stuff!!, and she just doesn’t give a single shit. Nothing a kid could say is going to touch this centuries-old life form’s self-esteem .
———
DS9 S2 Ep 18, “Profit and Loss”
– We’re doing Casablanca this week. Quark’s ex girlfriend has an AMAZING dress and excellent hair, she looks great. She’s a fun character, conceptually.
– An anti-militarist Cardassian student rebel White Rose league is a rich idea.
– Garak: *rips clothing to make a point*
Me: why would he do that, now he has to repair it—
Katy: Sometimes I get the feeling that Garak does not care about his tailoring business.
– You can’t do these one-off, weighty, big romance plots for the same character and never have those relationships have any lingering consequences. The ‘stacking’ effect cheapens every iteration. Eighties BBC scifi (and, arguably, some earlier Star Trek) got around this by just being very light on romance. In part, this was a structural choice motivated by an impetus to avoid this sort of ‘stakes’ conflict. There’s also something to be said about how DS9 finds ‘gross’ Quark’s sexuality inherently surprising and funny, again and again. By Time Three or whatever, is it really much of a surprise?
– Quark’s girlfriend accidentally shoots him and then freaks out about it.
– While I like the idea of her fine, Quark’s Girlfriend does suffer a bit from hetero writing disease. Their whole romance seems to consist of Quark saying ‘remember that time we did stereotypical romantic activities?’ Homie, that’s not a compelling character interaction, that’s a Hallmark card. What are you doing?
– Space Nie Huaisang dobs the White Rose League in, suggests a prisoner exchange for Bajoran nationals (which is accepted) and is then stuck getting asked to paint the roses red instead. Gul Fuckwidget is obviously going to take the credit for this assassination if it works, so Garak would be a patsy to agree. Evidently, this week Garak is a huge patsy, entertaining this phenomenally dumb idea.
– Garak enjoys a line stolen pretty directly from Avon, along the lines of ‘that alone makes it all worth it’. (Gambit’s version was “yes, well, that makes it all worthwhile.”) I wish that when people tried to rewrite Avon, they understood why that was good writing and how it worked. Instead you get this shit: the plotting equivalent of someone standing next to a painting of a car going ‘vroom vroom’.
– The Star Fleet and Friends cast is very down on the Bajoran provisional government’s commitment to a prisoner exchange: these people we’ve seen, who will suffer if given over to Cardassian custody, are more important that the people we haven’t seen, who are suffering! Granted, giving innocent prisoners over to the Cardassians isn’t cool, but it is a decent enough bet for the Bajoran government, whose primary responsibility is (and this is fair enough!) liberating their nationals from a racist regime that routinely employs torture. Perhaps, in the long term, it would be in Bajor’s best interests to prioritise fostering anti-militarism on Cardassia. But why should Bajor put its money on this movement? Cardassia’s internal affairs are not their business; Bajor’s citizens are being held. Whatever they did (and it was probably political crimes, given the primary vector of contact between these civilisations), the Cardassians aren’t exactly Geneva Convention-compliant jailers.
– Odo’s interference may mean some possibly equally innocent Bajorans remain in custody. He disobeyed a political consensus reached by duly elected officials. Will there be consequences for that?
– Odo is DS9’s answer to Spock and Data; what does that mean for DS9? What does he do for plots?
– A thing that frustrates me about this show’s writing is that I never quite feel comfortable engaging with plot and character problems from a position of knowledge. The genre and logic of this universe aren’t very internally consistent: I’m never sure whether anything out of shot is real. I thought Gul Stealyourcredit would fuck Garak over; he did. But that might just as easily not have been how this universe worked this week. In episode one of this season, we had to believe that, post-occupation, both Bajor and the Federation had established nothing like a protocol for prison camp recovery. More than that, they seemed never to have experienced it before. Do institutions and previous experiences exist in this universe, or don’t they?
This episode, Odo fucks over a prisoner exchange. Will he be fired for that? He won’t, because in this moment we’re in a heroic space opera. However, Bajor made a legitimate political decision Odo disagreed with. This is Bejor’s station. How will Odo’s actions affect future prisoner exchanges? Will Cardassian willingness to carry them out dry up? This show is super willing to say ‘politics’, and to use it as set dressing. It seems less willing to believe in politics as a real thing that exists, with attendant institutional apparatuses and consequences. The terms of the show’s political technobabble are irritating because you can’t co-think with characters, weighing the stakes and choices. The world works exactly as it needs to in order to make the episode work, so engaging with them is ephemeral and unsatisfying. It strongly reminds me of Richard Sennett’s point in The Craftsman regarding the value of material resistance.
Relatedly, I feel like DS9 isn’t consistently presenting or interrogating Odo’s relationship with or fixation on justice. Justice is and isn’t law, and conflicting systems of law are in play. This is especially awkward given that this show is in large part about a just-ended and entirely legal pseudo-Nazi occupation. A friend on Twitter suggested that Odo’s commitment was not to law or justice, but to “bureaucracy. Regulation as engine of actions.” This seems a plausible reading, and Odo’s characterisation, if that’s the case, could be both intriguing and psychologically tenable (if not necessarily sympathetic). But such a characterisation would have to be both consistent and afforded space for development. These seasons are so long and still, nothing about the characters or the world is given adequate time to develop?
The same person (@HooklandGuide) called the show’s handling of Odo tepid. “So often he is reduced to deus ex machina or straight man. There is a failure to make him a lens for the big questions, for the show’s values. Such a missed opportunity. DS9 is a collection of outsider perspectives (Sisko as Federation, but outsider as a mystic; O’Brien as ranks not officer; Kira as Bajoran working with Federation; Garak as exile etc.) and yet the one who should be the Spock/Data level outsider is almost entirely lost.”
———
DS9 S2 Ep 19, “Blood Oath”
– This Musketeer is drunk as fuck. This other Klingon is painstakingly slicing a kugel. Together, these three ancient Klingons and Dax will hunt an albino (an albino what??) who wronged them.
– Quark says a battle happened a hundred years ago, and then Odo calls it ancient. Even if it’s a casual usage, homie, aren’t there several Federation species for whom that length of time is easily inside an average lifespan, like Vulcans? That’s got to alter your cultural concept of time.
– The gifs are right, Klingons are cool with transition.
– Awkwardly, out of nowhere, Dax asks Kira how many bitches she killed as a resistance soldier.
Kira: Uuuuuuh, homie?
– I think Dax called the guy they’re after a depredator. Odd choice.
– Weirdly, Kira is not huge on revenge. I sort of felt like she would be down with this.
– The bat’leth remains a really cool weapon.
– The Klingons all low-key want to die in battle. They’re not keen on Dax coming, now that they realise she’s transitioned and has an entire life before her (are Trill supposed to undertake active combat, given that doing so might kill their multi-lived hosts?).
– Sisko reviewing Dax’s leave request like ’uuuuuh I see you’ve taken a Leave of Absence to… kill people?’
– Katy: It’s very obliging of this Depredator to just stand here and get killed.
Me: I think the back way out of the building has been cut off?
– Nice architecture this week on the besieged building.
– These characters are so inconsistent in their attitude towards murder. They take it extremely seriously, in this kind of cartoony way that isn’t really cognisant of the entire scope of death they regularly participate in. Many Star Fleet officers fairly often kill in the line of duty. Kira has also been an active terrorist. The man they’re after this week poisoned and killed three children, and has gone on to commit further lethal crime for decades: it’s death sentence material if anything is. The show’s creators glibly construct boundaries for viewers between legitimate, state-authorised violence staged onscreen and the possibility of illegitimate violence, which even Kira’s terrorism is constructed as. That’s wild given that Kira’s violence is blatantly self-defence in the face of genocide, and this Klingon affair is in accord with the recognised law of another major culture in the region. Thus to the extent possible outside of Federation norms, both forms of violence are even state-authorised.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 20, “The Maquis, Part I”
-Yep, it’s time for this whole plotline to be a thing.
– A persistent prop shortage that also crops up in the TNG films (less coherently: they’re all on the Enterprise) is here being passed off as a Fleet versus Station uniform difference, which I’m down with.
– Sisko and his mentor talk shit about whether Sisko is fucking Jadzia before discussing how they’ve both been recently widowed. Weird.
– Sisko’s mentor is really well-characterised. I love how their first conversation plays out, opening up disagreements within Star Fleet as to how this treaty works in the world and laying out a distrust of the Cardassians that’s more institutionally-located than O’Brien’s lingering racism.
– This Vulcan terrorist has a great dress.
– Dukat: omg, why are you mad I’m in your house?! 😦 I can’t believe you distrust meeeee, your friendly local Nazi pal!!
– Apparently Jake and Nog are ‘watching the women coming off the Bajoran transport vessel’.
1. Bleeeeugh.
2. Yeah an activity Dukat can absolutely vibe with, sure.
– Katy: Field trip with Dukat!! I bet Sisko fucking hates his job right now.
– Dukat says Sisko is joyless, which is fair because Dukat always seems to be Loving Life.
– Quark attempts to fuck this Vulcan five seconds after he Casablanca’d that Cardassian lady and ten minutes after he had a big Thing with a Ferengi girl in dead. Love affairs don’t stack.
– Dukat super cross that he tried to call the Cardassian ship involved in the fracas and no one listened to how important he was? Him! Dukat! The protagonist of reality!
– This discussion of the Cardassians’ hostile policing and how disposable Federation Central Command thinks settlers are is staged between two black men, and feels loaded with histories of racist American policing and government neglect or outright hostility. The Federation is nominally post-racial, but the Maquis are so heavily Native American. If they were white, would the Federation have cared more?
– A colleague reads the Maquis, in light of Bajor’s position as a post-war Israel analogue, less as Native Americans and more as intrusive and then recalcitrant colonists, a la West Bank settlers. In terms of the show’s vocabulary I see her point, but the planets the Maquis settled were Federation. or unclaimed, and uninhabited. The existence of a Virgin Planet is itself an imperial fantasy, but as it stands, the Maquis settled and worked uninhabited land, then the Cardassians came. I think this destabilises readings of the Maquis as actively colonial in a ‘West Bank settlement’ sense. I don’t think we can ignore the Native American semiotic layer, even if it doesn’t feel entirely cogent: it’s clearly a major part of what Star Trek wants to work with here. It is, however, consistently a problem that we don’t really know what about Earth makes people want to go colonise other planets, beyond some vague ‘spirit of Adventure’. Is everyone entitled to live on Earth? Is scarcity being resolved via colonisation?
– Kira is back on the terrorism chain gang this week. This is wild given that just last week, Kira was uncharacteristically gunshy. Again—an over-arching script editor might have been useful in smoothing over these contradictions, if the team lacked fine control over episode airing order.
– Dukat gets kidnapped by some civilians: embarrassing. Honestly, Sisko&co could let him get killed? No one has ever deserved a revenge killing more that Dukat: Lizard Mussolini. Snakey McChuckles is fair game.
– Odo comes over high-key fash about station security. Fuck? off??
– Ben’s mentor was clearly sympathetic to the Maquis, and now it’s official. (They say several things that make them seem like they’re supposed to be peers actually, but this guy looks and feels considerably older than Sisko.)
———
DS9 S2 Ep 21, “The Maquis, Part II”
-A random member of the Maquis holds Kira at gunpoint. She probably wishes Bashir weren’t here so she could give this newbie some tips.
– Dukat, guilty of both warcrimes and phwoarcrimes, is probably going to get a little tortured around the edges. Am I supposed to feel sorry for this guy? I don’t.
– The five pounds dripping wet blonde admiral from TNG who fucking hates Picard and vibes with Lwaxana is here to tell Sisko to get his shit together. Having her and her terrible attitude crop up in both shows feels nice from a world building PoV.
– Kira comes in to drop off a Space File and Sisko yells at her about the DMZ. Kira looks thrilled at the prospect they’re gonna bond by doing a terrorism.
– Quark hooked this Vulcan girl up with a ton of weapons. It’s not cute anymore? Quark should get like–thrown in jail and/or off the station for all his many, MANY crimes? Like, does nothing mean anything in this show?
– Odo wants to join the urgent Rescue Gul Dukat mission. Here for a gooed time, not a long time.
– Central Command of course is gonna Central Command. They throw Dukat under the bus, claiming he was supplying the weapons. Dukat is obviously politically expendable in the eyes of Prime.
Dukat: Can’t believe I’ve been kidnapped and I’m the fall guy. What a week, huh?
Sisko: Dukat. It’s Wednesday.
– The Vulcan girl tries combat telepathy. That seems really invasive, for a Vulcan? Maybe culture’s changed since TOS. I say that, but the actual answer is that the show has grown very casual about Vulcan abilities and weaponising them over the years. The mystification has evaporated, leaving a Racial Skill Set.
– Dukat’s boss: DS9 has lost its charm–
Like, since they turned off the occupation-era ambient smoke machines, or?
– Dukat tries hard to escalate the fight between the Maquis and him and then the three-way conflict between him, the Maquis and the Federation and get people killed in that cave; he’s war-hornee. I’d suggest a political motive (wanting to spark a conflagration), but ultimately the episode doesn’t commit to this and so it’s just ambient weird writing.
– Dukat gets invited to DS9’s staff meeting. It is awkward. As a viewer, this is kind of funny, but in-show, Dukat is persona non grata with the Cardassians, of limited utility to the Federation, and anathema to them. Why is he their freelance consultant? Can they condone and bear responsibility for his methods and actions? Because they’re inviting that, without even trying to resolve it without him. Relatedly, Sisko lets Dukat take the lead on a couple command decisions in a way I don’t think is a good idea in script terms? I wonder if it’s supposed to say anything about Sisko’s character arc. I don’t know that it is, if so. This willingness to fuck with Dukat weakens Sisko and the Federation, and the way it does so doesn’t quite make sense. It’s not offering a challenging alternate perspective, it’s the Federation’s having an early-stages crisis business meeting and they’ve invited a member of the local mob to sit in.
– Katy and I disagree about whether Quark’s speech made a lot of sense.
– The plotting is decent on these episodes, but the dialogue scripting is still sitting, painfully, at the Terry Nation level. ‘You have a shrewdness that sometimes surprises me!!’ type shit.
– Earlier on we had a whole conversation to establish that Dukat knows where the runabout’s button to fire on another ship is. There’s a final confrontation with the Maquis wherein Dukat’s console is on (earlier in the story, it wasn’t), which we know because of something that occurred a minute ago in the plot, and he wants to fire on the Maquis. Pavel Chekov’s photon torpedo just sits there, unfired. This was the pay off? Surely this was supposed to be the pay off, and a commentary on Doing Business With Dukat, who believes in keeping the peace not because he’s filled with compassion for all life blah blah, but because the treaty is in Cardassia’s best interests. Come on. It was right there! It was just right there!!
– Katy: It’s so unfair that Sisko has to deal with huge diplomatic problems. He’s only the same rank as Riker, who’s off happily playing his trombone!
– DS9 tries to tell me it’s gritty on the frontier as though the Enterprise crews didn’t almost die every other episode of the previous two series because exploration and diplomacy are tough and shit. DS9 is thus trying to establish a dichotomy with a Safe Star Trek that doesn’t quite exist. It’s bizarre this taste-change based retcon can happen even as TNG is still running, contradicting it? Because of this grittiness, DS9 ‘needs’ to conceptually fuck about with Section 31 and ‘wild and crazy’ morally grey tactics and bad actors (putting up with Quark and Dukat on the regular, working with an unapologetically fash-inclined Odo), because—well, because what, exactly? On a plot and in-world level, what’s changed, really, other than a wish for grit and a lack of confidence in non-martial conflict resolution?
This is part of the problem the show keeps having with Dukat. This episode, the Nazi Analogue plays the role of the Bad Boi team member who can make threats Sisko in order to resolve a conflict. (So what, you need the Nazis now? Are you NASA?) The show acts as though he’s bringing something the team needs and lacks, but it can’t even sustain that conceit within the internal logics of a single episode. Dukat only helps temporarily resolve a problem that Dukat’s side and logic started. All DS9’s playing footsie with ‘little a police state, as a treat’ in the Federated worlds doesn’t resolve the Maquis conflict: the Dominion War does (possibly after Cardassia wholesale kills opponents within its sphere of influence), and the ensuing collapse of Cardassian-Dominion relations.
It’s only series two, and I want to give DS9: the Rewatchening more of a chance. But sometimes I feel like rather than ‘problematising Star Trek’, Ds9 is actually doing something really cheap, and that it failed to understand the assignment. I may just eat this as I continue to watch, and indeed I hope I do. But I sort of think people confused ‘acknowledging the Real-Politik Necessity (?) of military-industrialism’/Better Things aren’t Possible with Maturity, and that the show also hit people at a Time (both in their own lives and in the zeitgeist: this coinciding with Blairism and its international equivalents). Again, the problem might be series two and own current awful mood, but while I’ve liked moments of DS9 so far, overall, on rewatch, I’m not enjoying it. A lot of the elements I liked as a kid, including Kira’s political positioning and the fact that Dukat is fun (but at what cost??), I have a totally different relationship with twenty years on. It reminds me of when everyone still thought Xander was the ❤ of the group!!, and I was at a loss because Xander is an asshole I can’t vibe with. That’s how I feel about Odo. He may give some people the Raymond Chandler horn and have occasional Moments with Quark, but overall he doesn’t come off as ‘a bad person, who is fun’, he’s just the worst.
A lot of DS9’s attempts to do bigger character and plot shit are commitments it doesn’t know how to do justice to. ‘Oh I’ll do a big Thing with Bashir, with Dukat’s arc, Quark Does Crimes!’ This is indeed ambitious, compared with TNG! But it’s also an opening to stab right into. The basic causality of the show falters. DS9 wants to do Commentary on the previous iterations’ worldbuilding and moral universe, but that commentary so far feels less cogent and thoughtful, more like a gleefully bleak assertion that neoliberalism is not a historical contingency we find ourselves immeshed in, but intevitable and forever (which flies in the teeth of actual history, but).
Why did American creators and viewers so easily read periphery/’frontier’ as a viable excuse for Federation representatives to circumnavigate ordinary, democratically-arrived at forms of justice and consequences in favour of an expansion of force coded as necessary? It doesn’t feel like these characters need more support, ask for it, don’t receive it and so turn to other problem-solving strategies, it feels like the whole conceit is an excuse to do more violent space opera because it’s cool. I kind of can’t believe this caving to American neoliberal logics is almost universally presented as a strong critique of Star Trek’s pre-existing neoliberalism? Like, is the Emperor naked? Do the next seasons gut this bad start like a fish? What the fuck is happening here?
A lot of professional opportunities are bound up in this, but this is why I really don’t want to be a Star Trek Person, Professionally, or A Doctor Who Person, etc. By working in that vein you’re tied forever to these things that are important to you, but tethered to a certain point in your relation to them. Star Trek will always be a big part of my experience and thinking. Precisely because of that, I hate the idea of being a Marketing Tool for whatever shitty new IP content is coming out—of not having a fluid relation to something I think and care about Because Capitalist Fandom. To love Doctor Who, I need to be able to fucking hate Doctor Who sometimes. Not in a jokey one off way but vitally, without that being a Farewell to my Livelihood and Networks and Construction of Self. You can’t be in a meaningful marriage if you don’t have the real option to leave.
The distributed, networking-based and ephemeral nature of freelance media work renders a lot of people are unpaid company handmaidens who live and speak Professionally against the chance of work. You can’t give up that kind of labour for free, especially with so little work going and with so many dodgy actors in these scenes. This position is not difficult for me to assume because I am cantankerous, so the necessary lifestyle diplomacy was always going to be challenging for me to execute. Also I don’t have dependents to support, and I’m not swimming in opportunities. No one is, granted, but I’m not facing some Faustian Temptation here. One can do trade eternally being a soft attache for an IP for access, and that’s not nothing. A lot of jobs ask similar invasive shit of you; this is by no means unique to pro-fandom. But it’s never like, Cool?
– This episode has a weird, fun concept involving probability, neutrino manipulation and gambling. TI’s very space fantasy, but it’s got some legs, and is more interested in SF than DS9 has yet shown itself to be.
– Julian enrages Miles by being unbearably Arnold Rimmer—just the fucking worst. Miles ‘dad bod’ O’Brien hates Bashir out of lingering Irish patriotism, probably. And because Bashir is a ponce.
– Quark, discomfited, consolingly coos t.o himself about a profitable racquet ball tournament.
– Keiko is still more attractive than Miles has ever deserved.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 12, “The Alternate”
– Odo’s evil Bajoran scientist/zookeeper dad, who Odo has evidently shaped his face to look somewhat like, is here. Katy observes that these Bajorans don’t wear religious earnings. To have had a lab during the occupation, they must have been collaborating to some degree. We also know, from Odo’s comments about having been made to practice a ‘Cardassian neck trick’, that they actively appeased and flattered their overseers.
– Sisko trolls Jake by making him turn his outing with Nog into a Klingon opera study date. Jake hates this shit.
– Painful awkward family dynamics between Odo and his ‘experimenting on him’ quasi-dad.
– Sisko talks about his own father like he’s dead. Go back to New Orleans and say that shit to his very-much-alive face, Benny boy.
– Why not just take a photo of this column? Why rob it?
– The Cardassians have left Sisko some amazing stained glass. I don’t think he even thanked those Nazis.
– Are we sure this is Dax and not a copy of Dax? Like. Can we be? (Some strange flags were raised, but that was not where the episode ultimately went.)
– Julian has a little incel conversation with himself re Dax teasing him. This is based on nothing. She did absolutely nothing. Just said, ‘have time to get coffee?’ That was it. I wish Julian a very happy ‘why didn’t you die instead of the main character who does?’
– Odo’s dad: I begin to think that the scientific method and criminal investigation have a lot in common—
I mean they’re both often tools of imperialism, so yeah buddy, I guess?
– Odo’s BadDad gives him a psychotic break, and Odo becomes goo about it. It is pretty well-executed both as physical prop-work and as a character moment. Though the technobabble at the end regarding why it happened could have been stronger, it feels like this show is growing up a bit.
– They’re talking about how to get a feral Odo out of the conduits. Just have Quark do some dumb shit at the entrance? If Odo walks around going ‘doin’ a fraud! Doooooin’ a fraaaaaud—’ I guaranteed you no more than a ten minute wait.
– Sisko gives a ‘shoot to kill if necessary’ order on Odo out of nowhere. Why? Odo attacked but didn’t seriously hurt anyone. The worst he did is bitchslap Bashir. We all want to do that.
– Why would this Bajoran scientist say ‘dear god’ when he’s from a polytheistic background, even if he’s not observant? I know expressions like that sneak into writing all the time, but a script editor should catch them, for the sake of world building.
– Everything the show does to seed the Dominion is good. We see them operating as a political force at one remove, via intermediaries affected by their actions (like the refugees whose conquerers were themselves conquered by the unseen Dominion, or the traders who know that the Dominion has the capacity to produce a vast volume of goods).
———
DS9 S2 Ep 13, “Armageddon Game”
– This ‘destroy the bio-weapon’ plot feels really Skaro.
Katy: Unfortunately Quark’s already sold the WMD to some Cardassians! Ruh roh-
– Weirdly it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bashir or O’Brien that they could have been targeted for elimination, because they know too much about the harvesters.
– Bashir is once again being awful to O’Brien. I don’t know why O’Brien doesn’t fucking nerf him.
– Bashir whines that a Career Officer shouldn’t marry, because it’s unking to make a wife worry about you (to a married man). b i t c h your wife could also be an Officer? What in the sam hell? What year is Bashir from?
– Now Bashir is talking some shit about how parties must mean nothing to Miles, because Miles is married and thus can’t have hook-ups. Buddy, unless you’re angling to find out whether this is an open marriage or something you could get in on, I wish you a very happy ‘this is none of your business’. Also, Bashir is a reasonably attractive dude. If he wants a hook-up, can he not just go to Quarks and find someone interested? I’ve no idea why we’re pretending he can’t get laid by many interesting and attractive women who know the replicator pattern for a ball gag to render him bearable. He yammers on about it like he’s a hyper sexual seventeen year old. You’re at work, man. (Talking about his hot ballerina ex with beautiful feet and great arches—listen buddy, I don’t want to know your FetLife deets? And all I can think of is SHOES FILLED WTH BLOOOOOOOD, beat-up ass ‘en pointe’ feet.)
– Sisko yells at Kira for being upset that O’Brien and Bashir are dead, which I’m sure is very helpful. Thanks, Sisko.
– Bashir is bearable, even a decent person, when he’s doing Doctor Shit, and at no other time. What a fuckboi.
– Julian lent Dax his ‘medical school diaries’ like a ponce. Dax didn’t read them, like an adult.
– Keiko’s Coffee Theory is one of my fav things about Keiko.
– O’Brien takes the piss out of Bashir’s accent. Excellent.
– Bashir has one of those weird faces that looks cute from a lot of angles, but sometimes he’s a sideways mess of lip meat.
– I never know whether I like that Keiko is ‘wrong’ about the coffee. It’s funny if she’s wrong, but it’s super cute and clever if she’s right.
– Tragically, it seems that O’Brien has come into a hideous ‘friend’. Pour one out for Miles.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 14, “Whispers”
– Keiko has found she and her husband a really good Japanese silk embroidered bedcover. Excellent work, Keiko.
– It’s hard not to like a character when they’re homies with Data, and after you’ve seen them have to deliver a baby… with Worf. That is, intrinsically, a bonding experience. For Keiko and Worf, for us and Keiki and Worf and this Unlikely Baby. It’s like that time Brian Blessed delivered a baby in a park and bit through the umbilical cord with his teeth. I feel connected as fuck to that baby, and I didn’t even see it happen.
– O’Brien worried this is a false Keiko: a fakeo. I guess we don’t know whether people on the station have been replaced or whether O’Brien has gone paranoid. ‘Just O’Brien’ feels more likely, on the numbers.
– Why not just replicate separate meals, according to your divergent preferences? The true miracle of replication is that you no longer need to suffer through or never eat stuff one of you hates!
– The whole ‘actually this O’Brien was a clone’ thing is well-conceived, but the mounting paranoia is executed somewhat flatly. This is both a script problem internal to the episode and an issue of broader emotional resonance, attributable to the fact that the show has yet to make me really care about the cast. I don’t think we can say ‘well, it’s early days.’ This would be the end of series three of a British television show: the Liberator would have just blown up, by this point in Blakes 7.
We’ve yet to be given slow-paced, single character-focused eps that open on to solid connection or pathos. The show talks as though, and relies on, a group camaraderie the characters have yet to actually build. It’s still hard to imagine any of these people choosing to spend time with one another wholly outside of work. Even Dax and Sisko, who have a pre-existing relationship, don’t seem to, and while Dax and Kira have good chemistry sometimes, I’m still not sure what they get up to beyond occasionally talking about the plot with space-coffee on a table between them.
In a way, this recalls how ineffective it was when the MCU tried to just speak ‘band of brothers’ into existence and work out its storylines from there. To make ensemble relationships affecting, you have to show that closeness, ease and intra (and thus also extra) textual connectivity at work. That’s a bit fiddly to do, but well-executed, it should actually take up very little page-space. You’ve just got to pound-for-pound infuse scenes that are otherwise deadweight plot conveyance methods with character, and then with interplay. That makes flat dialogue memorable. (And so far, DS9’s dialogue is pancake. Crepe, even.)
This example lacks the ‘sports anime’ warmth I’m looking for from a Star Trek ensemble cast, but right now this feels like Terry Nation DS9. I’m looking for the Chris Boucher edit. Honestly, they should have contracted Boucher to edit these. A lot of the mechanics and logistics are shite in a way he’s good at tightening up. And not fun, blousy shite, just ‘somehow there were ten people in a writers room, and basic if-then causality occurred to none of them’ style gaffs.
I wonder, actually, whether the whole set-up of the writers room, which would seem to make that sort of catch more likely, is, via either its constitution or as a premise, actually making these scripts muddy? Is it resulting in compromise formations? In a writer’s room, there’s a risk of personalities dominating the discussion in ways that don’t result in the best work, and of mutual overly-personal investment in the script that the clear responsibilities of defined roles and process layers might help a team avoid. Ideally, I’d expect a writer’s room to enable every script to access the skills of people involved, and to generate a collaborative synergy But does it play out like that? What do good and bad examples look like, both as workplaces and in terms of their process-flow and output? Can you effectively combine the writers room with a script editor role? Script editing can be enormously effective, and the absence of it can be hugely damaging.
I’m not actually interested in getting too deep into production, because sometimes it can overtake and even prevent criticism; production-first analysis risks becoming something like embedded journalism. I value production history, but it can overwhelm analysis of the resultant art. Ultimately, that output is what people see, and the foremost analytic object.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 15, “Paradise”
– O’Brien and Sisko get embarrassingly mugged by Robin Hood.
– ‘Oh noooo, all our tech doesn’t work on this planet—‘
That is absolutely on purpose. This girl did it. The talky one, with the hair net. Alixus? It was her.
– Alixus coos to her gay, interested son about ‘two more strong, healthy men’ like she made a really successful run to the grocery story.
– Dax laments that Sisko is bad at bluffing in poker. This amazes me, because he doesn’t emote the rest of the year. Just poker, I guess.
– Y e p, Alixus started the cult. It’s a pity, because she’s hot. Couldn’t she have found some people who really wanted to be in a non-religious Amish cult?
– Ah, a torture box. Great, cool. Sure. Everyone loves a torture box—
– Alixus’s tremulous voice makes it sound as though she’s always about to cry, which is interesting as an acting decision. It’s also intense, rendering it a good choice for a cult leader.
– The cult leader has deputised a hot girl to hit on Sisko, which is a neat move.
– I feel like this script doesn’t allow for quite enough in-story time for the conflict Sisko and Alixus are coming into regarding Sisko and O’Brien’s resistance to integrating into the community. Possibly Alixus is trying to induct them fast, for the sake of community cohesion? If so, it would be good to see that reasoning playing out more clearly.
– Kira and Dax share a well-executed scene of problem-solving. Dax fondly reminisces about rope bondage with a Native American partner. Ah, Dax.
– The episode’s field-labour in the hot sun and container punishment give it an especially disquieting plantation vibe.
– Miles has made a neat compass out of some absolute bullshit he found, like a fucking gourd.
– Himbo SAD.
– Alixus’s ‘community’ isn’t based on trust, though? Sooooo.
– Again, does the Federation not have psychology experts to send out to people who’ve been in a cult for ten years? They’re not going to bounce right back and make immediate, permanent decisions regarding leaving. They’ll have to process what they’ve been through.
– This episode might have been stronger for having the Star Fleet characters ever seriously question whether everyone is or can be happy in the Federation, rather than having the cultists’ argument be vaguely Luddite and Communitarian. You needn’t necessarily invite the viewer to interrogate their own relationship with satisfaction, or with technology, but it could be done.
What lack of community are these characters struggling with on Earth? In this vast, post-scarcity meritocracy, everyone competes for the meaningful labour/vanity posts given to the Federation’s abundant geniuses. So how do people fall out of that system, or find its successes bittersweet? Why were these people leaving Earth to begin with? What about leaving will tempt the Maquis later this season? I don’t think you can do Utopia and its Discontents without committing to interrogating the ways a good system can’t necessarily accommodate everyone. At the very least the cult leader herself felt driven to extreme action, even if her motivation was simply that she wanted the opportunity to be an egomaniac and lacked the skill to be the blowhard terraformer featured earlier this season.
– Another interesting way of handling this material might have been a PoV flip, shifting the main focus to a given castaway. You’d either condense the action of the last decade or start the story with the Incursion of Star Fleet, positioning the main cast as dubiously-trustworthy interlopers. That’s a bit too Twilight Zone for Star Trek in terms of its extreme investment in a short-term PoV, but occasionally you have to shake up the terms of viewers’ engagement with the narrative framework and the cast.
I guess the main problem with that would be that the show hasn’t built up a core cast that can sustain that kind of play. But at this point, it’s been three UK seasons. They’ve really run out of excuses for fucking about. I should be able to pretty easily write dialogue for the core cast by now, and I think I comfortably could do—Quark and Nog. Possibly Garak. And let me stress that I can only do Garak because he’s written like Discount Avon.
– How did I immediately know the technology problem was being faked? Was that familiarity wth this plot shape, or memory of the episode itself? I watched all of these at least once, as they came out. There are beats I remember when we see them, but I don’t really know what I know. My memory of the episodes will get better as we go, because of course I was eight when S2 aired.
At some point daddy got a VHS recorder, and we started to be able to watch episodes again. So some episodes I might have seen multiple times, and possibly significantly later than they aired. I remember that I was freaked out about falling asleep during the TNG finale at nine (like I wept), so we must not have had the recorder yet. There are TNG episodes on the tapes, however, and I guess those must have been out of order reruns. Ergo, what of DS9 I’ve seen more than once will really depend on what we caught on rerun and recorded. (Due to VHS recordings of PBS’s nth generation tape reruns, I did see fuzzy, out of order bits of the first two series of Blakes 7 while in high school, as well. I read synopses online for the later episodes, and to figure out what happened when.)
– This episode is about a Shirty Disabled Woman, and it’s kind of uncomfortable. Once again, this script makes this seem like the first and only time anyone has ever been disabled, or a non-humanoid species, in the whole Federation.
– I take it back, this episode is so fucking uncomfortable. Bashir is now teaching a woman not to have workplace disputes about her accessibility arrangements and Starfleet’s apparent lack of structural support.
– Julian tells a weird story about how he watched a child die when he was ten. He then thought about being a doctor, but instead tried to be a tennis player, and wasn’t good enough.
Katy: She could do better. I enjoy how rubbish Julian is, but that doesn’t mean I think anyone should be with him.
– Dax: I have fucked everyone. And I’d do it again!
– Katy: Wow. Bashir is such a good doctor that no one on DS9 is disabled. Look, he’s already fixed her need for a wheelchair. Yaaaay.
– In normal, official medical circumstances, the person doing massive experimental surgery on you should not be fucking you. Just a thought that apparently has not occurred to Star Fleet, despite that already being an understanding that exists in the real world.
– Klingon opera occurs. The Klingon bloke who owns this restaurant should be this character of the week’s boyfriend, honestly.
– A very awkward ending. There was a ham fisted bit that kind of worked? Then we finished with something no one likes: being sung at. Potentially the worst of all human experiences.
– A lot of early DS9 episodes creak because the world needs to feel more lived in. Even if we’re on a ‘frontier’, people arriving there will bring their preconceptions and experience to problems. The consistent editorial note that should have been raised with these scripts is ‘this has happened before’. Either infrastructure should exist regarding the problems they’re encountering, or there should be specific reasons it doesn’t.
– Also, Quark’s fucked about with illegal trades that could specifically get Federation people killed three episodes in a row. You have to stagger these, so we’re not stuck wondering why Quark isn’t in jail. If you lack fine control over the episodes’ airing order, then you have to do more individually distinct episodes!
———
DS9 S2 Ep 7, “Rules of Acquisition”
– The Grand Nagus offers Bajor some fertiliser. Why can’t Bajor just replicate this fertiliser, or indeed, food? If they can’t, why can’t or won’t the Federation? There could well be reasons, but it’d be valuable to explicate those for a couple of sentences.
– Ferengi foot fetishism is going strong this week.
– Quark thinks he’s gay for profits, but it’s a case of Shakespearean cross-dressing.
– My new catch phrase is absolutely ‘now I may have the weak lobes of a woman, but—’
– Looking forward to the plot development where the Grand Nagus fucks Quark’s mom. What a Concept.
– This profit4profit Quark/waitress romance is the realest thing in two seasons of DS9.
– Dax: Oh, you’re into Quark.
Waitress: Yeah, and I’m secretly a woman.
Dax: Oh and it’s het? Wow, wild.
– Ferengi latinum dildos are real, I’m just letting you know that.
– Nog: I have dirt on the interloper! He’s been using EAR enhancers, for his naturally shitty lobes!
– There was only one bed, in spaaaaace.
Katy: only one bed, cross-dressing—DS9’s coming back strong with this episode.
– Nog desperately wants to tell Quark that Quark can put off coming to terms with his sexuality for another year.
– What does the story vs teleplay distinction mean in US 90s script writing?
Like the fuck is this:
Story by : Hilary J. Bader
Teleplay by : Ira Steven Behr
– Rene helpfully informs me:
“I believe anyone who has the idea for a story gets the story credit. The teleplay credit goes to the person who writes the actual script that is shot. Often story credits go to people who pitched ideas or sent in spec scripts, even if many details are changed in the final version.
Like here, Hilary originally pitched it as a TNG story.
A bit of discussion of the writing history at 1:50 here.”
———
DS9 S2 Ep 8, “Necessary Evil”
– We begin with a truly amazing cape jumpsuit dress, just fucking ace. Thank you, space Frederick’s of Hollywood.
– The dialogue so far is crisp, like someone gave a shit, or like they finally found the paddles last week and rez’d a gasping script editor.
– Do people make strange and charm Quark jokes? I hope they do.
– Dukat’s OG DS9 lighting scheme is very blue-cool, I’m not keen.
– How did Dukat figure out that Odo could have the horn for justice? Dukat tried to fuck Kira and her mom, he has the emotional intelligence of a lemon.
– Dukat’s not nice, but he’s decent at his job. Which is good writing.
– Kira’s flashback !long hair is super cute. Labour camp chic
– Odo is now additionally hornt for the dictaphone he was previously a little bitch about, and doing his best noir narration. Fuck off, Odo.
– ‘I would have been executed’. Kira, you’re hot and Dukat was the boss at that point. I really don’t think Execution is the key threat, here.
– Cardassians have some fucking great interior design: like Vienna Succession, but evil. It interestingly and oddly overlaps with the palate of Bajoran influences.
– Why is Odo telling people about who he’s gonna arrest in an open bar, what the fuck?
– Interestingly they framed this shot so that Dukat didn’t see Kira’s face full on when they met.
– The flowers this assassin brought Quark look great.
– Rom’s got an amazing scream attack, like a shitty Jigglypuff.
– The Bajoran woman’s initial ‘say what you will about the Cardassians, they kept the power on’ comment makes a lot more sense now that we know she’s a fascist collaborator’s wife, as does the couple’s private room on the station during the occupation. But why did the wife say Kira was having an affair with her husband? How did she know Kira, or that Kira might be the culprit? Why wasn’t she upset about her husband’s death, if we’re supposed to have taken Odo’s shite deduction there seriously?
———
DS9 S2 Ep 9, “Second Sight”
– Sisko remembers his wife’s super dead and stuff (thanks, Jean-Luc).
– I never know what age Jake is supposed to be. Neither, I suspect, do the writers.
– Sisko meets a really hot woman in an excellent dress. Wow, damn, hello.
– Oh no, it’s a jumpsuit and cape combination with an excellent neckline. Sisko, your wife has only been dead for two years, but consider it, my friend. Contemplate the opportunity before you.
– Sisko, typically a bitch, is super cheerful now that he’s spent ten minutes with a hot lady. This suggests that if only Sisko was regularly getting laid, he wouldn’t be such a pest. Thanks Jean-Luc!
– Sisko now deals with an annoying man who has such terrible womb envy he has turned to terraforming, and gotten very Mumsnet about it. Sad scenes, here in the science lab.
– Katy hates the triangular space mugs. “They must be so heavy!”
– Sisko looks at the hot lady like she’s a sandwich he’s confused by. It’s a performance Choice.
– Kira wants to escape dinner with this blowhard. Julian thinks the guy is fine! Kira is like, fucking of course you do. Kiraaaaa.
– Dax, horrified: Do you think that because I’m a woman now you can no longer tell me about your hookups?! B e n j a m i n the BETRAYAL, I—
– Julian was named for Julian Assange, which explains a lot. Not everyone knows that.
– Oh wow a psychic ‘mate for life’ trope that goes badly and causes huge backlash. And this woman kind of has Vulcan ears. It’s like a weird side K/S fic.
– This terraformer is the fucking worst. At least he knows he’s a fuckboi and erases himself from the narrative, as it were.
– The Netflix loading screen for S2 DS9 also suggests Next Generation, TOS and Enterprise, in case you’d prefer your Star Trek either better or a lot worse.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 10, “Sanctuary”
– A random Star Fleet woman is so Moved by Bajoran beats that she feels compelled to hug Morn about it.
– Sisko yells at Kira for being Too Online while at work, shitposting furiously and getting no real tasks done. Kira sighs and admits that is fair.
– Any time you have to show people really appreciating art in art, just being blown away, it looks garbage.
– Kira is Uncomfortable with some random refugees feeling more at ease with her than with other people. The last time she did Emotional Labour, it was in a Cardassian camp—
– Everyone from Star Fleet is just baffled by what looks like a matriarchy. A nigh-universal failure to grok something really obvious, for the hurr-hurrs. Mediocre.
– Interestingly, I don’t think we’ve ever done the universal translators learning a new language family like this before.
– This ‘from a matriarchy’ lady seems to feel Kira is specially worth speaking to. More so than men. In a personal capacity. If you know what I’m—
– Quark is actually a fabulous uncle sometimes. He’s shown up to flirt with Odo and get Nog off the hook for petty crime.
– I rather like how all the women of this week’s alien race style their hair in a mantilla shape.
– I love that Quark and Nog hiss defensively.
– This Bajoran minister has excellent braids, they’re so good. I can’t be certain, but DS9 sometimes seems to do a good job of casting Jewish women as Bajorans, which provides a kind of internal consistency to Bajor’s status as a figuration of post-Shoah diaspora and Israeli Jewishness.
– Kira and her girlfriend of the week have a fight over the girlfriend’s refugee people’s desire to settle on Bajor. A quite well-written series of accidents causes a catastrophe that ought to have been avoidable, but happened nonetheless.
– There’s a recurring thread of a famine on Bajor. I need that better explicated, in terms of replicator technology.
– I’m so glad everyone’s anti-cop now, because maybe that means they’ll start finding Odo as boring as he is. They got a whole character out of ‘beige’. Amazing.
– ‘O no there’s a Bajoran group that wants the Federation out… after decades of occupation by another foreign power…’ like. I’m not surprised. ?
– Man, this random Cardassian guard is unbelievably stupid-horny. Kira and O’Brien are really going to leave their Federation phaser in the hands of people staying behind in this prison camp to hold off the guards, who will no doubt be immediately discovered and searched? Why did you bring Federation materiel on this secret mission? Why is O’Brien even here—he’s got a wife, and a small child?
– This whole escape attempt seems stage-managed and fake as fuck, not just Dukat’s ‘sowwy!!’
– I cannot fucking believe the Federation seemingly has no protocol for people coming out of prison camps beyond ‘immediately throw them to the wolves, I guess?’
– The scripting this week is feeble.
– Sisko: ‘Silence, hate crime victim Quark!!’ (I have never Vibed with Sisko.)
– Why do you think this guy who’s been in a prison camp for a decade would be ready to just bounce into a leadership position? Why would anyone think that? Who script-edited this?
– This episode was written by children. This prison camp guy, Li Nalas, doesn’t know who the live factions on the planet are: he cannot serve as the liaison officer to the occupying foreign power that Bajor depends on for military aid. The post is simply too important for someone without these core competencies, even given that they’re using him and want him out of the way.
– From a truly bad review of an itself-bad episode: “Additionally, the show further solidifies my hatred of the Bajorans- -one of the most annoying, aggressive and xenophobic people in the Trek universe–which is made worse since they are an omnipresent force on the show!”
Wow, it’s so weird that these recently-colonised people are suspicious of outsiders? Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American…
———
DS9 S2 Ep 2, “The Circle”
– DS9 is not nearly as consistently politically intelligent as people who prefer it to the other series tend to claim. It sometimes bites off more than TNG, and ends up mumbling edgy buzz words.
– Now Odo is here to make Kira do emotional labour about how he’s upset that she got de facto demoted. Get in the bin/bucket, Odo.
– Kira’s uniform is still really good, imo. Her red leather ankle boots are fucking great.
– Sisko’s saying like ‘we’ll get you back, Kira!’ lands like ‘don’t you worry, once this quarantine is over, we’ll go to Nando’s again!!’
– Vedek Bareil needs to learn vocal intonation. Like, any change of pitch. Kickstarter to help Vedek Bareil unlock ‘expression’. Who the fuck cast this guy? Every scene he’s in, just replace him with a package of luncheon meat. Subtitle lines.
– Bajoran architecture remains excellent. This moon door, the art nouveau lines—the script isn’t working, but the design team sure is!
– To be fair, Ep 2 is much, much better-written than Ep 1. Every time Kai Wenn talks, you want to brain her with an orb. Fair!
-And we do all like an Odo, Deputy Quark buddy-cop team up. Quark is proving more useful than three other characters put together.
– Li Nalas, character of the week, is so fucking destined for death. The flags on this one.
– Me: Of course you shouldn’t get involved in an internal Bajoran conflict Sisko, you CIA precipitate? Listen, the station moved to the worm hole, I need you to fly it back out of Bajoran air space to execute the complete materiel evacuation you’re positing—
Katy: He can’t hear you.
– It’s not that Sisko is annoying me, it’s that I feel like he’s (somehow!) not even trying not to?
– Sisko’s actor sometimes feels like he’s trying something Shatnerian, but predicated on an odd reading thereof, decades later, and without that underlying theatrical tradition. His line deliveries often feel rather, ‘that was the take you went with? Well, Okay.’
– I don’t know the names of any actors on this show except for Michael Dorn, by the way, and I hope that never changes. I have been actively un-knowing this information for over a decade now, so please do not tell me.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 3, “The Siege”
– Keiko telling the truth about Miles O’Brien’s o’fucked priorities.
– Dax/Kira, Jake/Nog and Odo/Quark are all making some good showings this week, here in part 3 of a story that honestly didn’t deserve the real estate.
– You really have to give it up to Kai Winn for finding new ways to be the fucking worst every season. I would never even have forseen the possibility of how shit she is by the end of the show; I lacked the douche vision.
– Odo: I’m a wAaaLl!
– *a hint of bad PR* Wait where did Kai Winn go??
– Every patsy who Kai Winn leaves the hot second things look iffy: “It truly be your own hos that do it to you—”
———
DS9 S2 Ep 4, “Invasive Procedures”
– They shouldn’t have aired these two episodes wherein ‘the station has to be evacuated and is left with a skeleton crew, plus Quark, who is fucking about with a Scheme’ back to back.
– Katy points out that Trill are a cool concept, functioning like Time Lords’ regeneration. I wonder if that’s where the Next Generation writers got it from?
– Quark makes hideous keening sex noises to sell this fake injury, and if any benighted soul out there is writing Quark/anyone, these had better feature large.
– This week a random sex worker kicked Kira’s ass, just annihilated her.
———
DS9 S2 Ep 5, “Cardassians”
– Here in a rather stupidly-named episode, Space Nie Huaisang makes a mixed race child uncomfortable.
Katy: To be fair to him, Garak’s primarily narrative role is to make everyone uncomfortable.
– A hot tip from me: don’t proprietarily touch random unknown children? If they bite you that is what it is.
– Katy: Anytime Dukat is on the space phone, I flashback to having to talk to a sales rep who’s just lying right to my face.
– Garak gets maximally ‘oh dooooooes he’ regarding Dukat’s ‘I have Legitimate Concerns regarding war orphan repatriation’ spiel.
– Dukat hasn’t bothered learning Bashir’s name. Classique. God I wish that were me.
– Sisko is evidently feeling Feisty about Bashir: asking a reasonable question.
– O’Brien is still very racist against Cardassians; I would not have boarded this kid with them. Even Keiko, who is normally excellent, is being awkward with the child. Again, does Star Fleet not have any form of standard protocol for child welfare issues?
– Garak is here to lisp his way into Bashir’s bedroom and the A-Plot.
– The thing is, I don’t have nearly the time for Garak/Bashir that every other lesbian seems to. Yes, Garak is immensely gay, and yes, that is A Unit of Twink, but Garak could go to any corner shop, they sell them in pairs. So: Nie Huaisang and Arnold Rimmer are on a field trip. Garak steals tens of thousands of records on children with no regard for data protection, and is then nearly forced to have a feeling (for children). Disgusting.
– Someone bothered to write decent lines for Budget Kerr Avon this week, but mostly just for Garak.
– ‘I couldn’t even stay on Bajor, continuing to commit war crimes—too many feelings!!’ – A Cardassian I Am Supposed To Feel Sorry For, I Guess?
– The problem with Dukat—a Nazi—is that this unghostbusted slimer is simply a more compelling actor than the ones portraying most of the main cast. I don’t enjoy that, but here we are.
– Garak is smiling benignly, oozing around the room like a sand worm with a human face. So his Plan is Gelling, I guess.
– O’Brien: I can only imagine how bad this child’s biodad must feel to be told he’s shitty, after doing all those war crimes—
Okay, Miles, thanks for your input.
— Oh my god, Sisko is sending this Bajoran-raised child back to Cardassia? Is he high? What the fuck? This kid’s eventual suicide is on ‘forget about it like the world forgot Sisko’s’ hands, I’m just saying.
I read Diana Wynne Jones’ novella The Game in a day, which was a pleasant surprise directly after my much bumpier reading experience with Dark Lord of Derkholm. I’d been told Game was quite like Eight Days of Luke in both the reading level it’s pitched at and its subject matter, and found that comparison very fair.
I think perhaps, in part, my own mood caused me to not really vibe with the book’s insistent referentiality. It felt a little too Ready Player One. That’s a far ruder comparison than this perfectly decent novella warrants, but while I’d happily engage with some writing on the works Game cites, Jones largely just touches on mythological topics rather than either making them integral to this story or using her references to comment on the myths themselves. In that context, chasing after dropped hints hardly seems worth the effort. Oh look, a brief cameo of sex-pest Zeus ruining swans for everyone. Just making a whole new situation terrible, as is his way. Whelp, there we are, then.
The thing is, I’m tired. Not ‘it’s three am’ tired (though that too), like, lifestyle tired. I can’t be fucked. Perhaps this aspect of the book works better for children. When I was younger, I suspect I might have enjoyed shuffling through my then-fresh knowledge to trace every line of influence, and thought quite well of myself for each success. I can no longer muster the requisite energy and naïveté to believe that sort of cleverness matters. Ultimately, it’s just slightly embarrassing.
This does mark, so far as I’m aware, Jones’ second major referential use of Doctor Who (the time and space box in the sci-fi mythosphere strand). The Chrestomanci series contains a police-box passage in Caprona, and elements of Charmed Life, such as Christopher’s essential dimension-hopping manifold-mortality (not to mention the long, multicoloured scarf knitted for him in Oxbridge), establish a Who-inflected general framework for the series. Some things about Time City are a bit War Games (traitors from within the time-traveling culture, the SIDRAT-style room of boxes and the time-coloniality of the set-up), but I wouldn’t bet the farm on that one.
As the racial composition of the UK changed, Jones’ work, often addressed first and foremost to child-readers, did seem to take into account that the children she was addressing might no longer be demographically identical to the wartime children she (b. 1934) grew up among. Sometimes, as with Aiden Cane in Enchanted Glass, there’s a vagueness to Jones’ handling of her characters’ race that feels more ‘outside looking in’ than people actually understand themselves as (I remember from Dogsbody, et al, that Jones can be comparatively clearer regarding what flavour of Celtic everyone involved in a story is). Initially when the protagonist Hayley contemplated a picture of her father, who has dark skin and who evidently gave Hayley her difficult to manage dark, curly hair, I assumed Jones was rather ambiguously telling me that Hayley was, like many children in modern London, BAME. It later transpired that instead, Hayley’s parents are Greek demigods. Was I supposed to have been led astray, there? Character race in childrens’ books, with their often poor rates of representation, feels like somewhat too charged a subject to play with readers’ knowledge-levels about in that way. But perhaps writing in 2007, near the end of her life (2011), Jones wasn’t involved in those then more nascent conversations.
Why, then, are all these Mediterranean gods living in the UK now? In-world, it’s not really explained. In a Doylist sense it’s because, via the construct of a shared Western Heritage, the Anglosphere thinks that Greek mythology is an un-raced common property that belongs almost as much to England as to Greece. It’s easier for Jones to set this in the UK than for her to figure out how to set it in modern Greece and then sell the resultant book to English-speaking children. This pretty significant transposition doesn’t quite register as weird because England ‘owns’ world herritage in the way Jones’ Time City owns it, via the transitive property of imperial logic. It might twig people as stranger to involve the modern nation of Greece. The British Museum can just take better care of the Parthenon friezes, uwu! Actually, isn’t classical antiquity more the property of Oxford than, you know, Greeks?
At the book’s end, Hayley’s parents blithely decide not to return to Greece because ‘it’s changed’. Anything that happened to Greece after antiquity, and indeed the contemporary degree to which Greek people are racially and culturally included in the Anglosphere’s conceptions of Europe, is far murkier in the Anglosphere imagination than this sense of ‘shared’ ownership of antiquity. This model of communal (?) Western Heritage is extractive and fundamentally unconcerned with Greeks, who figure largely as an unsightly imposition on amber-preserved Classical Greece. This is a conceit I think children’s literature does a lot to uncomplicatedly embed in the name of acculturation, which should be interrogated at the source.
Jones makes a point of saying that Zeus’s power now comes as much from money as from myth. While I wonder where Hades is in that equation (seeing as wealth is properly his domain), as usual, Jones demonstrates a strong awareness of power structures and how they play out. Class in a British sense is layered throughout this novel. Hayley’s father is tortured in an industrial estate. This choice emphasises the growing importance of the uncountable, mysterious and malevolent movements of international capital (without any of the antisemitism some comparable depictions of finance rely on or easily invoke—I’m thing of Chesterton’s reading of the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend). Jones is absolutely right: there is nothing more sus in modern Britain than a ‘Joylon’. The really tragic thing is that Electra and Aster (which is how two of the Pleiades are styling themselves, these days) are pitch-perfect bullshit UK Posh People names, as well. Just spot on.
I wanted to close by discussing the element of the book that, for me, is absolutely going to linger. As I said, I struggled somewhat with The Game’s ‘gameification’ of its references, finding Jones’ engagements with myth more generative and rewarding when sustained. The several-page scene wherein we encounter the Maenads, for example, is viscerally scary. My whole idea of the Bacchae was flat, like a 2-D painting of Sexy Bad Women executed from a male PoV. The sheer sensual grotesquerie and violence of Jones’ treatment has probably altered my idea of these figures forever, curiously moving them from a more pictorial, Mythic idea to something experiential: something weeping, reeking, blood-coated, screaming-raw. It was the best scene I’d read in ages, and justified the whole fucking book. The scene wherein Hayley’s mother rescues her father is also powerful, and I dug everything involving Yaga.
Ultimately, I’d have liked another couple of paragraphs on this version of Zeus’s whole Deal. Why is he so keen on control in small things seemingly unrelated to himself? What does he perceive the stakes to be, beyond the threat Hayley presents to him? Has he always been like this? That doesn’t quite fit with Classical Zeus As I Know Him. Were all the characters who were drawn to him in mythology, and thus in this book, drawn to this unpleasant personality? Has he changed? Has the altering of mores over time, or the changing nature of Zeus’s fame, changed him?
(Also, my friend Marita’s edition had illustrations and shit which mine, sadly, did not.)
“Based off Chat Noir’s costume design (a leather catsuit with a bell collar and a mop of blonde hair), my partner initially assumed this was a YA-marketed cartoon about a young lesbian couple. We were thus disappointed to discover that Chat Noir was a boy, and that the show (especially initially) was aimed at much younger audiences. Over the course of its first season, however, MiraculousLadybug & Cat Noir went from pleasant to deeply enjoyable. Its world and plot complexity increased, its ensemble cast grew and developed and, most importantly, its core “love-square” romance blossomed. Even though it is sadly not centrally focused on teen lesbians (we’ll get to Rose and Juleka), Miraculous is still one of the best-made and most thoroughly enjoyable shows running, full-stop, no caveats. The fourth season of twenty-six episodes has just begun airing, the exact date varying by country.”
My review of the book “Metamorphoses of the Sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children’s Literature” is up here.
Excerpt:
“Nothing is more tedious than asking a book about x why it is not a book about y, as though the ideal book is some kind of monstrous gesamtkunstwerk. But even so, it is odd to read a book about the sublime and gothic in primarily-British fantasy fiction and never once encounter Peake, even in the form of a dismissal.”
In this bumper issue of the SFRA Review, you’ll find many papers from the Worlding SF conference, among them my ‘The Future, Wouldn’t That Be Nice?’ on post-scarcity economies in SF television (including Doctor Who and Star Trek). Relatedly, you’ll also find my not-very-positive review of the book Trekonomics.
Full text of the review:
“
Trekonomics
Erin Horáková
Saadia, Manu. Trekonomics: the Economics of Star Trek. Published by Pipertext Publishing Co., Inc., in Association with Inkshares, Inc., 2016. Hardcover, 280 pages, £17.70. ISBN 9781941758755.
Saadia’s Trekonomics was the first book I finished in 2019, and I can only pray it will be the worst text this year has in store for me. Trekonomics treats the Federation’s post-scarcity economy, focusing on replicators as the primary agents of that prosperity and eagerly conflating them with robotics technology. Saadia pays some attention to the pulp science fiction that informed the series’ initial development, and a good deal more to the psychology and social organisation of a human race freed from want. There are significant digressions on the Ferengi and, to a lesser extent, the Borg’s alternative economic models. Saadia also discusses how the Federation might practically operate without specie, especially in macro and micro ‘international’ contexts.
The editor of this journal derisively asked what a whole book on Star Trek and economics could be expected to yield. With respect, I think the approach could be quite fruitful. For one thing, there’s a ‘wealth’ of interesting data on work outside of the constraints of capitalism that could be brought to bear. Extra-capitalist tribal economies, historically and today (in regions like the Bastar forests in India), have struggled against a global capitalism that would ‘civilise’ them by assimilating them and their resources into its productive and consumptive workforce. Part of such tribes’ struggle has been to make patronising outsiders see their subsistence activity as the highly-skilled labour it is. Various Communist countries have produced labour statistics, and centuries of aristocrats ‘worked’ without strictly needing to do so. How many members of the Royal Academy of Science were not leisured gentlemen? Italian Autonomist Marxist theorists like Sylvia Federic have examined unremunerated female labour, while Olga Goriunova has built on that tradition to theorise digital art economies and fan spaces. Academia, especially in the era of precarity, yields fulsome examples of ‘valuable’ work done outside of strict causal relationships of remuneration. Thinkers like William Morris treated ‘work beyond capitalism’ a century ago: there’s plenty of material to fill out a contextualising lit review, here. This single aspect of the Federation economy–which Saadia is at pains to justify, seeming to believe we’ll find it impossible to reconcile with common sense–could be elegantly linked to a variety of concerns and conversations. Set Phasers to Teach! (Springer, 2018) makes a sound case for using Star Trek as a teaching tool across several disciplines. Thus Trekonomics’ unwavering disinterest in such engagements cannot be attributed to its subject.
Despite both eschewing many such opportunities to incorporate valuable context and its scant pagecount (much of which is taken up with spacey introductions, accolades and indices), Trekonomics struggles with its length. A degree of circularity is to be expected when dealing with interlinked ideas, and sign-posting can be a helpful gesture. Nevertheless, I felt Saadia reiterated his scant points too often and allowed chapters bleed into one another unhelpfully, seemingly because he didn’t have enough to say. I don’t feel Trekonomics–a word the author loved to repeat in an awkward gesture of brand-building, like Gretchen trying to make fetch happen–substantially benefited from being a book rather than an article. Given how effective late capitalism is at circumscribing our vision of the possible and the fact that, for many people, this mass media text’s provocative possibilities of a post-capitalist world are the only exposure they’ll have to such ideas, this is a shame.
The book is at its strongest when summarising context that may be fresh to readers, such as Assimov’s pulp career (I knew almost nothing of that). But I’m very troubled by how casually the book makes misleading, flatly erroneous or unsourced assertions regarding subjects I am familiar with–how can I trust it where I have less information to help me weigh its claims? “Great voyages of discovery and world changing inventions were never […] collective enterprises.” False and nonsensical, and indeed contradicted by what the author himself says about the invention of the warp drive. “There is a reason why universities are designed around campuses: to foster an intense social life, the ferment of invention and progress.” Misleading and baffling–does the writer think reliable distance learning servers were on the table in medieval Bologna? Horndog Kirk makes several appearances, and as I’ve stated elsewhere, this is a mass cultural reading predicated on scant textual evidence and mobilised in the service of hegemonic discourses of masculinity. Jim Kirk is also, Saadia claims, from Iowa because a protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s is. I went to uni next to aspirant birthplace Riverside, Iowa, complete with dinky Enterprise statue a la literal cart. Saadia’s claim isn’t the story I know, and he gives no evidence to substantiate his version. Quibbles about the choice of foci (I wish there’d been more discussion of what can infer about Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan economic models, contrasted against the Federation’s brand of social coercion, as well as more speculation about questions like who gets to live on Earth and how such a society might organize career assignments or social projects) are trivial when compared to the fact that I simply can’t trust this text.
Saadia also speaks of “the Aztecs and Incas, who were swiftly dispatched by the conquistadores’ venereal diseases”. Smallpox, which killed many Incans and Aztecs, is primarily airborne. The Nahua peoples, sometimes called Aztecs, are still alive and struggling for visibility and representation today, along with other Native Mexicans. This is all easy to find, non-specialist information. In an effort to describe the historical violence of colonisation, Saadia’s bizarre assertion itself enacts racism, suggesting that these people vanished off the face of the earth, possibly because they were promiscuous. The alternative interpretation, that these civilisations were sexually assaulted to death, elides the economic and cultural realities of slavery and religious conversion in a manner that is of a piece with Saadia’s attempts to describe capitalism without racial capitalism, manufactured desire or indeed the violent forces of capital (complete with an exit from late capitalism via beneficent tech-overlords who voluntarily relinquish their hoarded wealth and power). There are several such odd and potentially hurtful inaccuracies in a book nominally aimed at creating pluralistic economic utopia in the now, and thus aspiring to the best values and life-experience depicted in Star Trek. The book’s assertion that the Maquis are simply ‘freeriders’ for attempting to retain their homes, for example, doesn’t sit at all well with the discussion of Native rights and the limits of utilitarianism in “Journey’s End” (TNG 7×20). One might suggest that striving towards kindness and excellent work for its own sake Saadia piously recommends could begin at home, say by writing a more collaborative and thoughtful book.
One could explicate Trekonomics’ dubious statements for pages, but it’s just not worth it–especially when the logic and assumptions underlying Saadia’s arguments are often more contradictory (and indeed, often more disturbing). So many of his broad assertions about economics and ‘human nature’ are highly contestable, deeply located in our particular Western moment. Saadia shares these as though he’s already done the work of proving them true and universal. A great many interpretive avenues are thus unduly foreclosed. For example, no serious consideration of the range of economic possibilities depicted in these texts, the underlying structure of economics or the potential ‘ideal’ futures of labour could possibly be complete without a thorough, good faith engagement with Marxist and other extra-capitalist economic theorisations. You don’t have to be a Communist or Anarchist to think so, it’s simply a question of due diligence. Even to dismiss them, you would have to reckon with them, and Trekonomics does not. Saadia never once mentions Hegel, but sometimes this book smells like Austrian spirit.
I would never say that people outside the academy can’t make immensely valuable contributions to scholarship, fan and otherwise. Such a temporally short-sighted, classist position would, for example, discount the enormous intellectual labour of someone like ‘Ms Potato Head’, the Fanlore archivist and digitiser who remains anonymous even within fandom due to the contentious nature of her work, who’s done far more to preserve vanishing print and digital cultures of female and queer writing communities than academia will before it’s too late–and without any institutional support, in the teeth of an archival establishment that still often doesn’t accept what she does or even the work she protects as legitimate. However, Saadia’s lack of allegiance to academic norms of rigour has cost this book dearly. What he in particular brings to this intellectual endeavour beyond salesmanship is unclear to me. I believe Trekonomics’ brand of pro-capital techno-optimism owes more to Saadia’s working in LA ‘helping tech startups get off the ground’ than anything else. The whiplash between the coloniality and reactionary capitalism that underlie this book and its simultaneous liberal self-perception and vision are very of a piece with that background, those loyalties. The book’s kickstarter funding starts to feel a little like a well-intentioned con.
I’m equally unsure who this book is aimed at or could offer something to. I don’t know much about economics, so it’s strange that this book didn’t ask me to learn anything new. Trekonomics doesn’t go hard enough for an engaged academic audience. It doesn’t provide baseline context well enough to clue in readers whole unfamiliar with this field and its terms. It’s not particularly fun, or deeply engaged with its core text, which I’d argue it often reads rather poorly.
There could be a good book on this subject; this ain’t it.”
Charmed Life 
