We shotgunned the first four seasons in about two weeks, and immediately caught up on the fifth season (and now we have to wait along with the rest of you). I was pleasantly surprised to see Penny Johnson become the new captain of the precinct in season four as I loved her on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Her character's name is even a nod to DS9: from Kasidy Yates to Victoria Gates.
And then I started seeing more ex-DS9 cast members showing up in Castle. Michael Dorn, who played Lieutenant Commander Worf, has shown up in a few episodes as Beckett's therapist. Nana Visitor, Colonel Kira Nerys, plays a dog trainer in one episode. And most recently, Armin Shimerman, Quark, shows up as a sci-fi weapon maker in an episode that revolves around a Star Trek spoof.
And then I got to thinking, "Man, I really love Star Trek," so I'm gonna go ahead and talk about that.
How's that for a switcheroo?
I have been watching Star Trek for as long as I can remember. I used to watch episodes of the original series with my mom on rainy weekends, and then I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation as often as I could catch it (I probably saw it in syndication as well in the mid-nineties as I was only four years old when it first premiered).
I didn't get to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine until much later in life. It was in college when I finally started watching it, at the insistence of one of my co-workers in Midtown Comics. I borrowed his VHS tapes (yup, we still had VCRs back in 2000) and popped them into my VCR and proceeded to watch a fair number of episodes completely out of order. Then that same co-worker purchased the DVD sets and let me borrow those instead, and that made for a much better viewing experience. After that, it was all Trek all the time. Voyager, movies, The Animated Series, books, games, all of it. I even watched the first season of Enterprise when it came on (I could not continue, though I've been told it actually gets much better; I powered through Voyager, I'm sure I'll get through Enterprise at some point).
DS9 is my favorite Star Trek series, and I have watched every episode at least three times (I've watched my favorite episodes upwards of ten times). I know, I know. Most of my friends hold up TNG as the best of the bunch, and yes, it clearly has the best single episodes: Inner Light, The Best of Both Worlds, Measure of a Man, Darmok, etc. These and others are fantastic episodes that are better than pretty much every single episode of DS9 there is (except maybe Past Tense and Far Beyond the Stars... maybe). But where DS9 truly excels and where TNG mostly falls flat is in overarching storyline. TNG uses, like its predecessor, a very, very episodic formula. World-shattering changes and character-defining moments are largely ignored by the next episode. Captain Picard lived an entire man's life in the aforementioned Inner Light, which should have had an enormous emotional impact on him, but it's never mentioned again (his time as Locutus of Borg is not brought up again until the movie Star Trek: First Contact!). But that's totally not the case in DS9. There is continuity even during the relatively weak first two seasons. Once the Dominion threat starts up in season three, there is a narrative cohesion that completely blows away TNG. Gul Dukat's character arc alone is worth the price of admission. He is far and away the best written antagonist in a science fiction television series ever.
Another thing that DS9 totally has over TNG is its level fun. I cannot think of a single episode of TNG that is just fun for fun's sake (I'm sure they exist, I just can't think of them right now, so clearly they're not that memorable). DS9 on the other hand... Take Me Out to the Holosuite, Our Man Bashir, Trials and Tribble-ations, any episode featuring the Mirror Universe or the Ferengi (or both, as in The Emperor's New Cloak), and my favorite of the bunch, Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang (see? my title wasn't complete nonsense).
Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang was the fifteenth episode of the seventh season, and the last purely fun episode of the series (everything after this is war, war, glorious Dominion war). In no way, shape, or form is this the best episode of the series. Hell, it's not even the best of the season (not with episodes like The Siege of AR-558, It's Only a Paper Moon, Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, When it Rains..., and The Dogs of War in the same season). It's not even the most fun episode of the season, as the aforementioned The Emperor's New Cloak appears three episodes earlier.
But it's totally my favorite.
In Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang, Vic Fontaine's 1960s Las Vegas casino is taken over by a Philly mob boss named Frankie Eyes, who hates Vic. This is all thanks to a jack-in-the-box often-talked-about-but-never-seen holosuite programmer extraordinaire Felix put in the program when he first created it. In order to save the casino, as well as Vic's job, the senior staff (except Worf because I guess he had better things to do, like his job and the war) have to get rid of Frankie Eyes in a period specific way ("In other words, if we have to shoot him, we have to do it with a forty-five automatic and not a phaser," Chief O'Brien says). After much deliberation, they decide to rob the casino. That's right, there is a casino heist in a holosuite, on a space station on the edge of known space, in the middle of an intergalactic war, in a Star Trek series, and that's totally awesome.
Captain Sisko has an obnoxious scene about how he won't help out at Vic's because real 1962 Vegas was totally racist and that shouldn't be forgotten, but Kasidy sets him straight. He is of course totally right, but dude, don't be a buzzkill can? It's the only "serious" scene in the whole episode, thankfully, and he's in on the heist immediately afterwards.
The best scene of the episode is when they walk out on the Promenade in their period costumes, and look totally badass doing it:
I'll let you watch the episode for yourselves to learn how they pull off the heist, but it's a damn good plan with a variety of cons ("I'd say you're looking at a Bowski, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever!"[1]), and the episode ends happily, and delivers the greates ending of all time. Captain Sisko gets on stage and sings a duet of Frank Sinatra's The Best is Yet to Come with Vic Fontaine:
How can that not be your favorite episode of Star Trek ever?
P.S. You should totally be watching Vegas with Dennis Quaid; that actually takes place in 1960s Las Vegas, and Michael Chiklis is a mob boss. You can catch up on it right quick as it's only on its eighth episode. I will talk about this again, I'm sure, when I do a write up on westerns set in the modern day (which include things like Justified and Longmire. I should probably also do something on westerns set outside the US, like The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, and The Proposition... man, I love westerns...).
P.S. You should totally be watching Vegas with Dennis Quaid; that actually takes place in 1960s Las Vegas, and Michael Chiklis is a mob boss. You can catch up on it right quick as it's only on its eighth episode. I will talk about this again, I'm sure, when I do a write up on westerns set in the modern day (which include things like Justified and Longmire. I should probably also do something on westerns set outside the US, like The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, and The Proposition... man, I love westerns...).
[1]
Ocean’s Eleven, dir. Steven
Soderbergh, writ. Ted Griffin, perf. Brad Pitt, Warner Bros., 2001.
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