The Differences of Deep Space Nine

As an eleven-year-old, I was first introduced to The Next Generation series. Then came Voyager. Then, the original series. I loved them all. I was in my early 20’s before I had the opportunity to really sit down with Deep Space Nine and watch it all, but I finally did. And I learned that what is often said of Shakespeare's use of setting, theme and character can also be applied to DS9:  namely, that there is a character, a place and a theme in there for each and every one of us. Swashbucklers, hardworking blue-collars, devious and cunning types, intellectuals, and that’s only scratching the surface. What about themes? Marriage, religion, money, power, politics in both domestic and foreign flavors, terrorism, it's all there. For openers,  let me start with something that’s hitting home across the American Midwest today, money and labor relations.

Union workers across America are seeing their benefits slashed. State workers in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and now I hear in my home state  of Tennessee have had various work-related and bargaining-related rights taken away. It's been tried here in Illinois too and doubtless will be again. Two years ago, in fact, I participated in a lawful strike on behalf of our own graduate student union. The particulars aren't important now, but when I came home, having observed the picket lines, I watch the fourth-season episode, "Bar Association." You may recall, that's the one where Rom and the rest of Quark's employees form a union and go on strike to protest Quark’s 30% across-the-board pay cuts. Ok, maybe it was on a space station, and maybe it involved a bunch of strange aliens with huge, comical ears. Yet that episode resonated with me, because I knew what it was to have to struggle against an enormous, indifferent power structure, and me being at the bottom of the economic food chain. And that's only one flavor in which money is represented! For another example, consider the fifth-season episode, "Business as Usual." That's the one, just in case you need a brief reminder, where Quark is drowning in debt and his cousin Gaela persuades him to go into arms sales. Yeah, pretty much any money-related episode is going to feature the Ferengi, but then, unlike the Federation, the Ferengi still use money. So there we are. As for "Business as Usual," an interesting question of principle comes into play:  do the ends justify the means? A cliché question, some say. A timeless one, I say. We’ll come back to that question in a much more meaningful way in a bit. If you haven't seen it in a while, watch it again and notice how Quark's friends, the station's command crew, answer that question. They clearly disapprove of his way of getting out of debt. easy for them to say, one is tempted to add here, since his friends don't use money and aren't facing crushing debt and imminent ruin. Fair enough. But remember also, Quark himself is faced with the ultimate test. Will he do the thing in the end that will bring him riches beyond his dreams, or will he balk on moral grounds? His choice doesn't concern us in this discussion so much as the way money is dealt with and represented in the Ferengi-based episodes. And speaking of those Ferengi and their money ...

The Ferengi are infamous for two things:  their greed and their treatment of women. Quark's mother, for one, is definitely not willing to subscribe to the accepted morays:  that women should always be naked and in the kitchen, never allowed to participate in the business world, forbidden by law from earning profit. Note how Ishka, Quark and Rom’s mother, protests that she, being a “female” and all, is just as capable of earning profit as any male and much more skilled at it than many. I’m referring to the third-season episode, “Family Business.” These strictures are so extreme as to appear ludicrous. I grant you that. But in their own way, the struggles of Ferengi women mirror women's struggles in many a culture of our own day, including the good old U S of A! In many employment sectors, women are still underrepresented and underpaid. Even here in America there are religious groups who see Woman's place, as the old saying has it, "bear-foot, pregnant and in the kitchen." The troubles of Ferengi women and the Women's rights movement that Quark's mother initiates, resulting in the reforms that Brunt and Quark talk about in DS9's next to last episode, “The Dogs of War,” mirror the travails of as well as the progress made by women's rights organizations in America towards a more equitable society.

Well ok, enough about the Ferengi and their money. Truthfully, they’re not my favorite race. How about marriage? True enough, we've seen a marriage or two in star trek before. The O'Brians' wedding in the fourth-season TNG episode, “Data's Day," was particularly event-filled. Yet DS9 deals with the topic from multiple perspectives. Culture, gender and value clash all in one? Can't do better than Rom and Lita’s subplot in the fifth-season episode, “Ferengi Love Songs.” In Ferengi culture and law, when a woman enters into marriage, it's customary for her to sign a document known as the Waiver of Property and Profit. This is somewhat similar to old English Common Law, wherein any property or money held by the woman transfers to her husband upon marriage. Lita, being Bajoran,  refused to sign, and Rom was faced with a choice. His choice is summed up in this conversation.

Rom:  “Latinum lasts longer than lust, rule of acquisition 229.”

O’Brian, “Maybe, but lust can be a lot more fun.”

In the end, he decides that this waiver is far less important than keeping his fiancé and his engagement. Good for him, I say. On second thought, I can go you one better. How about the sixth-season episode, "You Are Cordially Invited." Warf and Jadzia's wedding. A Klingon and a Trill? A fun-loving Trill and an ever serious Klingon with little sense of humor too. You may recall Jadzia's refusal to kowtow to Martok's wife as the mistress of the house into which Dax wanted to marry, and the cancelation of the wedding that happened as a result. At one point, Warf, thoroughly depressed and at loose ends, is sitting in his quarters aboard the Defiant when Martok comes calling. I've told my own fiance that I could kill the script writers for writing such a profound dialogue between those two. Warf is reflecting on the many differences between himself and his erstwhile fiance, and he observes that she's nothing like the woman he always thought he'd marry:  "Anyone can see that we are hopelessly mismatched. She is Trill, I am Klingon. She's had five marriages, this would be my first. When she's laughing, I'm somber; when I'm happy, she's crying. She plays Tongo with the Ferengi bartender; I can barely stand him. She mocks everything, while I take everything seriously. ... She is nothing like the woman I thought I'd marry.”

After Martok commiserates, discussing his wife Sirella’s own particular shortcomings, he tells Warf that in spite of all those things, he loves her deeply. Martok then goes on to make a statement about marriage that, couched as it is in Klingon custom and culture, is the best defense of and justification for marriage I've heard:  "We Klingons often tout our prowess in battle and our desire for honor and glory above all else ... but how hollow is the sound of victory without someone to share it with. And honor gives little comfort to a man alone in his home ... and in his heart.”

As for other aspects of family, let's not forget that DS9 does a much more thorough and more consistent job of portraying family struggles than the other series manage. Benjamin Sisko's struggle to raise his son on the station is a recurring theme throughout the series. And, I might add, I'm glad Jake didn't join Starfleet. That would've been too much the expected thing, following in his father's footsteps. There are lots of great Ben-Jake moments to choose from, so many in fact that for any one I might choose, someone else could argue that some other would have been better. I can respect that. At least there is such a large number to pick from. Yet, if I had to pick just one exemplifying episode, it'd have to be the fourth-season episode, "The Visitor." TV Guide ranked it in the September 21, 1996 issue as the best episode of trek, any trek, ever produced. In 2004, it slipped to fourth place. It's a truly phenomenal piece of television, nominated for a 1996 Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation, and fans and cast alike frequently hold it up as their favorite. I'm right there too. Tell you what, go read the Wikipedia article for the plot summary, or better yet, watch it. You don't have to be a star trek fan generally or very familiar with DS9 in particular to appreciate it. When I first showed it to Nicole, and even with her being as unfamiliar with star trek at that time as she was, she cried her heart out over it. Hope you don’t mind me telling people that, Dear. Go on ...  there, seen it? Excellent! Jake's devotion of half his life to the rescue of his father, and his choice to make the ultimate sacrifice so that his father would be restored to his rightful place in the timeline, thereby nullifying the older Jake's entire existence, is only comprehensible if we can be brought to understand the love and the bond that existed between father and son. No other episode of trek handles that relationship nearly so well. And who can forget that immortal bit of advice that Benjamin gives to young Jake and that, many decades later, Old Jake gives to the young writer who has come to visit him,  “It’s life, and you can miss it if you don’t open your eyes.”

Let's move to religion. Benjamin Sisko's role as the Emissary of the Bajoran Prophets is a thread that runs throughout the series and impacts both its beginning and its end. Personally, I don't think it was the best move on the creators' part, but they did it, a lot of folks like it, and it affected the series in some interesting ways"'. Recall that the Bajoran Wormhole is an artificial construct built by alien beings who exist wholly outside what we know to be space and time. To the people of Bajor, they've been a sort of deity, appearing in the people's holy writings for millennia. So the first question that comes up is, who are the Wormhole guardians, the Prophets of Bajor, or just some super evolved life form? What troubles Sisko throughout the series is that they may be wearing both those hats. Just the same, how ought we to think of them? I'm put in mind of the final episode of season 1, “In the Hands of the Prophets.” The school teacher, Keiko O'Brian, is caught up in a controversy over how to present information to the school kids about the wormhole. Should she, for example, teach that the wormhole is a scientific phenomenon and that its builders or  occupants are simply another in a long line of alien races the kids learn about? Or, as Vedek Winn demands, ought she to teach that the Wormhole is the literal Celestial Temple of the Prophets? what if both are true? Does anyone look at that discussion and not see the decades-long debate over how and what to teach our own school-children about evolution, creation and so-called intelligent design? I certainly see the connection. My guess is, I’m not the only one who does.

I want to switch topics radically now. This being my blog rather than my doctoral thesis, I can do that. From religion to terrorism. On second thought, that’s not such a radical shift after all. Terrorism has this interesting thing to note about it. It polarizes. You may have heard that old axiom, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter/revolutionary/martyr/hero.” Well with DS9, star trek had come of age and was ready to explore this issue in the form of the Maquis.

A brief intro to the Maquis is in order. The name comes from the old French resistance in Nazi-occupied France. So, when the Federation and the Cardassian Union signed their permanent (or not so permanent as it turned out) treaty, they created a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between their two spheres of influence Ideally, no Cardassian ships were to enter the zone and pick off Federation colonies, and no Starfleet ships would cross into the DMZ and wipe out any happy Cardassian settlers. Well there were problems. The DMZ wasn’t placed precisely between Federation and Cardassian territories, but rather it was a zone of space that strayed into both. So picture a few Cardassian colonies in Federation territory and a few Federation colonies in Cardassian territory. This is what you call, “trouble.”

We first hear of the trouble in the two-part second-season episode, “The Maquis.” You see, the problem with telling your people, “hey, your colony world is now in our former enemy’s home space, you need to leave,” is simply this. They may not want to leave. And they didn’t leave. Trouble, in the form of one set of colonists attacking the other, wasn’t long in coming. Colonists on the Cardassian side were secretly gifted with weapons from the Cardassian military, and since the Federation wouldn’t reply in kind, Federation colonists resorted to getting weapons by any means necessary for what they claimed was self-defense. Sounds like the Israeli-Palestinian situation to me. As you can imagine, feelings ran high. There were those on both sides who sympathized with the colonists, and there were those who saw them as terrorists, plain and simple.

In truth, there was nothing simple or black and white about it. Why else, for example, did Starfleet officers, sworn to protect and defend the Federation, resign their commissions and go to work for the Maquis? TNG’s Ensign Ro Laryn, Commander Cal Hudson from the DS9 episode just mentioned, Voyager’s Commander Chakotay, and DS9‘s Commander Michael Eddington are the examples that come to mind. The answer is this. The situation wasn’t black and white. As one officer said, “it’s a bad treaty. We gave too much away.” And what do you do when faced with a bad treaty and an opposition who refuses to play by the rules. The colonists’ answer was, if the Federation won’t help us, we’ll break the rules to survive. And so they did.

The thing I like about the Maquis theme that runs through DS9, also through Voyager and the end of TNG, is that it shows life in the twenty-fourth century as less than ideal. Jean Roddenberry wanted to present star trek as being an ideal that humanity can reach if it wants to. His reasons for this creative decision are beyond reproach, and he did well. There have been many who reprove the creators of the Maquis and of the Dominion, which is our next topic, because they take away some of that idealistic shine from the star trek universe. To me though, what they did was to make it a more believable place. Michael Eddington said it best in the fourth-season episode, “For The Cause” when he told Sisko, “Nobody leaves paradise.” For whatever it’s worth to fans of the Original Series who see star trek’s cause gone awry in Deep Space Nine, and there are many of you, I still think Jean Roddenberry’s universe, Dominion War and all, is a better one overall in which to live.

Speaking of paradise, it’s time to talk about the Dominion War. I stayed away from this topic until now for a couple of reasons. First, it’s such an obvious thing to talk about, and is so often the first thing that people think of when they think of Deep Space Nine, that I wanted to cover other things first. It’s also one of the things that drew the most criticism from old line fans of trek. “A war,” they said, “you can’t have a nasty war in star trek. It’s not what Jean Roddenberry would’ve wanted.” Actually, I can tell you that this was the last series he knew about before his death, and while he didn’t have a hand in its inception, he did approve the direction in which the creators, Ira Stephen Behr and Michael Pillar, wanted to go with it. The interesting thing about war is that it tends to bring out all of our best and worst qualities. It also represents a radical departure from a show that’s mostly based on exploration like TNG, and it drives home the idea that not everything in the galaxy is necessarily amenable to our ideals or our ways of doing things. The Dominion War was an enormous plot concept in the series, and this series marks the first time in trek that a plot concept was introduced and sustained over a long span of time. Because of the skill of its handling, I’m going to discuss the way the plot concept was introduced, and then hit on a few things that bring us back to particular characters and particular questions of principle. So bear with me.

The first mention of the Dominion was deliberately set in a comical Ferengi episode, the second season episode, “Rules of Acquisition.” We don’t know much about it, merely that it’s there, it’s big, and Quark might get to trade with it. The closing episode of season 2, “JemHadar,” reveals the Dominion to be a large collection of civilizations headed up by the Founders, Odo’s fellow shape shifters, the Vorta, the Dominion’s diplomats and advisors, and the JemHadar, the military arm of its empire. In “JemHadar,” as well as the two-part episode that opens season three, “The Search,” we are brought to understand that the Dominion is a ruthless organization that is not to be trifled with. I find the subsequent three seasons’ buildup towards war to be magnificently done. Consider the paranoia about changeling infiltrators in the fourth-season episodes “Home front” and “Paradise Lost,” the Founders’ (changelings or shape shifters) attempt to destabilize the quadrant by provoking the Klingons and the Federation into war, see “Way of the Warrior” and “Apocalypse Rising,” and the Dominion’s efforts to create allies in the alpha quadrant as a prelude to its all-out assault. See the fifth-season episodes, “In Purgatory’s Shadow” and “By Inferno’s Light,” which should have been one episode with a part I and II, if you ask me. Seasons six and seven deal with the Federation plunged into all-out conflict. As I said, the buildup of the Dominion and the war as a plot concept had never been tried over so many years within star trek before. Having said that, there are numerous episodes I could discuss, numerous questions that could be raised. You could probably make a book out of all that can be said in regards to the themes, questions and issues that the Dominion War plot concept is able to deal with. But this is a blog, not a book. So I limit my Dominion War focus to two concepts that explore the timeless ends versus means dilemma.

The first is section 31. In the sixth-season episode, “Inquisition,” they are revealed for the first time. A small, highly covert, highly autonomous intelligence outfit, they are neither answerable to nor connected with the main Starfleet or Federation power structure. They are revealed as being a highly elite and unprincipled group of people whose sole goal is the preservation of the Federation at any cost, and any cost means any cost. Deception, sabotage, murder and downright genocide are not beyond this organization. Naturally, the question surfaces, does an idealistic state like the Federation or even, let’s say, the United States, need such groups to do its dirty work? Can such groups be justified? In the seventh-season episode, “Inter Enim Silent Leges,” Dr. Julian Bashir, who is asked time and again to join 31, is arguing with a 31 operative who offers him this justification to think about:  "The Federation needs men like you, doctor. Men of conscience. Men of principle. Men who can sleep at night. ... You're also the reason Section Thirty-one exists -- someone has to protect men like you from a universe that doesn't share your sense of right and wrong.”

Do men like Dr. Bashir and the normal run of Americans who work our 9-5 jobs and watch sports on the weekends need a section 31? When the Patriot Act came out and all the controversies surrounding wiretapping, indefinite detentions, waterboarding, and our habit of turning terrorist suspects over to foreign countries for their nastier version of interrogation came to light, there was a lot of outcry from civil liberties organizations. :That’s very un-American, we don’t do that!” Except the truth is that we did, and still do. So I ask again, does America have a section 31? What would happen to America if it didn’t have a section 31? Do we, as Operative Slone suggests, live in a world that doesn’t play by our notions of right and wrong? You may notice that I’m not offering any answers to these questions. The answers are for you, not me, to decide. Throughout the section 31 thread of episodes we see the main characters reacting in opposition to the methods of 31 and disagreeing with its idea that any means of guaranteeing the Federation’s safety is valid.

            Yet there is a counterexample to the characters’ staunch, “no,” to 31. I’m referring to the sixth-season episode, “In The Pale Moonlight.” This is another all-time favorite of both fans and cast alike. The war is going badly for the Federation and its Klingon allies, and Betazed has fallen to the Dominion. That’s Deanna Troy’s home planet, in case it sounds familiar. Sisko knows that the resources of the Romulan Empire, which has thus far remained neutral in the galactic conflict, could provide the allies with what they need to turn the tide of the war, or at least, to prevent the Federation’s fall. What’s interesting here is the slippery slope path that leads Sisko from considering how to locate genuine evidence of a Dominion plot to assault Romulus, to thinking it would be more feasible and necessary to forge that evidence himself. All that Sisko does along the way, from liberating a criminal from a Klingon prison to get him to create the forged holo-program, to bribing Quark into silence after Tolar tries to stab him, is done because he sees  it all as the only way to accomplish the greater goal of bringing new allies into the war on the Federation’s side. This is a goal that is beyond reproach, and the question at hand is method versus motive. Sisko is very much aware of the moral dilemma he’s found himself in. Yet as a station commander determined to preserve the Federation, he sees his service to the greater good as superseding his own legal and ethical violations, even if he is still tormented by those violations as is clear in his log entry:  “people are dying out there. Every day. Entire worlds are struggling for their freedom and here I am still worrying about the finer points of morality. I had to keep my eye on the ball. Winning the war, stopping the bloodshed. Those were the priorities that mattered!”

One has to wonder who he’s trying to convince, us or himself. Juxtaposed with Sisko in this story is the Cardassian tailor and ex-spy, Elam Garak, who has no such moral scruples. His planting a bomb on the Romulan senator’s shuttle was the result of ruthless calculation. As he explained, the Romulans would blame the Dominion, and the more the Dominion protested its innocence, the more the Romulans would think them guilty, and in the end, Garak reasoned, Sisko would get what he wanted. And so it happened. And was it a high price to pay? Garak doesn’t seem to think so as he lectures Sisko in the final scene:  “If your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don’t know about you, but I’d call that a bargain.” Well if history is our judge, Sisko and Garak were vindicated. The Romulans entered the war on the side of the allies and the Dominion and its allies were subsequently defeated. So the question remains, does Sisko’s goal justify the wrongs that he did along the way? A better question might be, can you live with what you did, your goals being what they were. Sisko gives us his own tormented answer before deleting his entire log entry. I wonder if it’s the same answer I would give,  “Garak was right. A guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. so I’ll learn to live with it.”

            Now I’d like to turn my attention to character development as we witnessed it in Deep Space Nine. Star trek has never lacked for colorful, well-developed characters. Character is one area where all the major series have excelled. Truth be told, my own favorite characters aren’t DS9 characters, but there is something about character development that DS9’s very nature makes possible to a greater extent than is possible in a series like TNG or the Original Series.

            I said earlier that DS9 was a show where problems persist. There’s no Enterprise or Voyager that can go to warp and leave the problem or the troubling person behind. So, the creators of the series had the chance to do some major character development with relatively minor players, even some working for the other side. After all, we’re used to our captains and our other big-time protagonists being thoroughly developed, but the villains and the minor players being developed? That’s rather new.

            Let me start with the Cardassians. Gull Dukot, skillfully played by Mark Alaimo, (who we also saw portray star trek’s first ever Cardassian as Gull Masset in TNG’s fourth season episode, “The Wounded”), starts out as an urbane, seasoned commander in the Cardassian military. He’s introduced to us in the first half of “Emissary” as the former Cardassian commander of the station formerly known as Terok Nor and now called Deep Space Nine. He shows up in every season, and we follow his fortune as he falls out of favor with the Central Command as demonstrated in Episodes like the second season’s, “The Maquis,” as he maneuvers and plays civilian power politics, ingratiating himself to the new Detapa Counsel in the fourth-season opener, “Way of the Warrior,” and finally as his rise back to power hits the fast track with his exploits in the fourth-season episode, “Return to Grace.”

            Until the fifth season, Dukot is a somewhat down on his luck military officer who retains a certain urbane polish. His ascendance to ultimate power as seen in the fifth season finally gives him something to justify all of the bluff and bluster, but to me, Ducat’s most profound development doesn’t come until seasons six and seven. During his tenure as commander of Terok Nor under Weyoon’s supervision, the series creators explore a personal, even familial side of the man. For example, consider the triangle of interaction between Dukot, Kira and his daughter Ziall. Dukot, in spite of all that he’s done, still considers his daughter of paramount importance. We see him juggling the necessities of command with the concern of a father for his daughter. So on the one hand, we have Ben and Jake Sisko, and as a mirror counterpart, Dukot and his own estranged daughter. And who among us didn’t want to wheap during the final moments of the sixth-season episode, “Sacrifice of Angels,” when damar pulls a phaser and shoots Zial dead. We see Dukot kneling on the deck holding his dying daughter in his arms, and it’s written in such a way that for a moment, for just one moment, we forget that he is a ruthless warlord, and we se him as a father holding his dying daughter in his arms.

            Finally, consider Dukot’s own religious transformation in light of his mental breakdown after Zial’s murder. . Sisko was tapped to be the emissary of the Prophets, a role he never fully embraced or enjoyed. Dukot, meanwhile, became the emissary of the Pa-Raiths, the Prophets’ counterparts. And unlike Sisko, he embraces his religious role, and it transfigures him. Now you don’t have to be a psychologist to suggest that he falls into the grips of the pa-raiths because his daughter’s death unhinges him. Even I thought that much. But regardless, it happens, and for my part, I always felt a certain pity for him, even at the end. As he falls under the sway of the pa-raiths, Dukot becomes something of a madman, a Jim Jones type, a religious maniac, in short. Consider the seventh-season episode, “Covenant.” I think Jim Jones and Jonestown must be what they had in mind, considering that Dukot tried to murder all of his followers when the kidnapped Kira blew the whistle on Dukot impregnating one of his flock. The final disposition of Dukot, what we see in the story arc that concludes the series, is probably a fitting end, as he’s given wholly to the Pa-raiths and shares their fate.

            To take a more positive example, let’s consider a harder case of character development, Damar. Casey Biggs plays him consistently and well. He rises from an insignificant Cardassian second in command under Dukot in episodes like “Return to Grace,” and “A Call to Arms,” to leader of the Cardassian Union under Dominion Rule during most of the sixth and seventh seasons. What was of greatest interest to me about Damar is what was done with him in season seven. The creators really make his disaffection with and disillusion by the Dominion really believable. It’s not done all at once. It’s done gradually as he sees Cardassia supplanted by Dominion control. He comes to understand Cardassia’s secondary status in its alliance with the Dominion and eventually the Breen, and this understanding comes not all at once, but one slight and one negligent act at a time. In an interview, one of the series creators said that it had been the original plan to reveal that Damar was a double agent working for Starfleet all along, but what actually happened was more believable. The series  took a relatively flat and unnoticeable character, turned him into a villain by having him murder Zial and lead up the Cardassian Empire, and then transformed him into someone we could sympathize with and even admire as a disaffected freedom fighter. His death was the death that all self-sacrificing heroes in our movies and our novels want, a death in service to a great cause. As such his death is a bit predictable and something of a plot device, but if it’s a cliché, it is so because the cliché worked.

            Now I have to come back to the Ferengi. No, it’s not Quark I’m thinking of. It’s Rom. Quark’s brother is portrayed as the bumbling, sometimes slow, younger brother, almost a form of comic relief. In the show’s early days all we really know about him is that he’s the father of Jake’s only play mate, Nog. He’s always running around fixing things, doing what Quark tells him to do and answering, “Yes, Brother,” to Quark’s every whim. Not until DS9’s third season does Rom start to develop. First we see his deep family commitments, commitments that outweigh any sense of Ferengi custom. For example, to Quark’s disgust, Rom supports Nog’s efforts to enter Starfleet Academy, “Heart of Stone,” and when Quark sabotages the holo-suite in an effort to derail Nog’s entrance exams, Rom quite seriously threatens to burn down the bar when he tells Quark that his, Rom’s, son matters more to him than anything, even profit. See the third-season episode, “Facets.” Rom’s attachment to his mother is unwavering and demonstrated again and again in all the episodes where Ishka appears, and it would be a mistake to think that Rom doesn’t love his often abusive and domineering brother just as much. Finally, as I’ve mentioned before, Rom marries a non-Ferengi, an act that, more than any other, shows his own willingness to stand up to his culture’s morays and to set them aside. It’s often said that nice guys finish last, and if that’s true, Rom would have faded into the mists of obscurity. But Quark gets the ultimate lesson in the importance of maintaining family ties when he is passed over for the position of Grand Nagus, and Zek, at their mother’s urging, makes the younger brother, the loving son, Rom, the new Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance.

            As I bring this to a close, I look back at all I’ve written here, and I know it’s not exhaustive. I probably didn’t mention someone’s favorite character, not even mine. And likely as not, someone’s favorite episode isn’t here either. Well that’s what I get for writing a blog, which my fiancé insists is actually too long to be a blog, instead of a book. I’m certainly not qualified to put all of this in a book, and besides, who’d read it. Still, a lot has been written about James Kirk and Jean-Luke Picard and Data and Spock and all the rest. Deep Space Nine in comparison has had rather little said about it. So now, thirteen years after its final episode, “What You Leave Behind,” aired on television, I put pen to paper as it were and offer a few thoughts. Hopefully you might look up a few of these episodes and, having done so, you might see what I see in them. Or better still, you might see something that I didn’t see in them. That works too.