excited to announce i'm starting a DS9 rewatch

is THE EMISSARY the only good star trek pilot? it's pretty amazing, and watching it made me realize that i actually may have never seen it the first time around

if you wanted a greater statement of intent about how DS9 was not TNG, you have the scenes where cisco is seething and can barely stand to be in the same room as picard. later he forces quark to keep his bar open by ...... putting a child in jail!!!

bashir barging in and announcing to major kira how excited he is to practice "frontier medicine" [chef's kiss]

oh also the idea that the cardassians just wrecked bajor on their way out -- at first i thought this was a reference to the atrocities the indonesian army committed in e timor after their independence vote, but then i remembered that happened 6 yrs after the show was broadcast!

making this a thread, i guess??? the early part of season 1 where everyone's like "so, who's gonna fuck jadzia" did NOT age well

BASHIR: but were such good friends with curzon. surely that gives you an in, fucking-wise
SISKO: nah man, that'd be weird. if you want to try to fuck her despite her repeatedly demonstrated lack of interest there's certainly nothing i, commanding officer to both of you, can do

do we ever get more odo-kira backstory? like, i feel like it honestly SHOULD be a bigger deal that the head cop of the cardassian station just stayed on now that it's a bajoran station, and if she only met him a week ago its weird kira backs him so completely

also like ... we see there are bajoran cops who answer to odo, who i guess is legally (?) a bajoran? did these guys serve under him on terek nor? i'm guessing he didn't order cardassians around. was there a vichy police force who's now on the outs?

one thing they've brought up that i don't really remember from my first watch is how unstable bajor is, which totally tracks -- lots of post-colonial gov'ts collapse into civil war almost immediately upon decolonization!

quark has a great line about how when gov'ts fall, people like him get lined up and shot. anyway i kind of wish i knew more about who exactly odo answers to, seems relevant for the angry mob of ex-resistance guys who tried to lynch him

i'm just now kind of realizing that i didn't really watch the early seasons of this show bc they were out when i was in college. i think i started in season 5 when i was in grad school & then caught up w/earlier syndicated eps in parallel but clearly didn't see everything

anyway my last note on S1E3, "A Man Alone" is that "oh by the way we can make clones now and they have legal personhood, we actually made one by accident as part of this murder investigation" seems real glossed over

oh also a belated note on S1E1-2, "The Emissary," is that, uhhhhh, they don't actually talk about Sisko being the emisarry????

S1E4: was quite prepared to discover that the gayness of the bashir-garak action in this ep had been magnified in the retelling and memeing, but I’m here to report that it very much was not

also i realize that this is my own particular kink but i desperately wanted to know more about the politics of the various bajoran splinter groups. some of them are still doing attacks on cardassia i guess????

also very curious about the passage of time on the show, as the pilot seems clearly to take place days or even hours after the cardassians pulled out, whereas this ep seems months later -- they can talk abt an assassination as not being breaking news, for instance

also the fact that in this ep a hardcore bajoran nationalist tried to blow up the wormhole so everyone would leave bajor alone seems to indicate that "the wormhole is the celestial temple and the prophets live inside it" hasn't really become common belief yet?

haven't been updating this thread w/every ep but i've decided to give the ferengi eps a chance this time around and finally got to the first one. it's, uh, something

would've liked to have been in the room when they offered wallace shawn the role of a wizened, horny alien plutocrat-king. how quickly do you think he said yes. do you think he even asked for any money