Bitchy History - January 26, 2025


＂Warp Speed Woke＂ Lecture 3： Deep Space Nine and The Clash of Civilizations


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 5 minutes

Words per minute

155.58

Word count

10,205

Sentence count

478

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

50

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 All right, so today we are going to be talking about Deep Space Nine. This is my absolute
00:00:07.680 favorite Star Trek series. It is just very near and dear to my heart. And today we're
00:00:14.520 talking about how it fits in with this post-Cold War narrative of what the world looks like
00:00:21.180 after the end of the Cold War. And it's really just a fascinating look at how these things
00:00:28.140 can be talked about in fiction. So to give a little rundown, most of you guys know a lot about
00:00:35.540 Star Trek, but just to give you a little rundown on this show, it started production in 1992. The
00:00:41.440 series runs for seven seasons from 1993 to 1999. It's running concurrently with Star Trek Next
00:00:49.660 Generation for the first two seasons and then also concurrently with Voyager for a few seasons as
00:00:55.500 well, which made this show kind of the redheaded stepchild of the Star Trek genre. It was not
00:01:03.580 really the most beloved. It was kind of a weird series that took an entirely different type of
00:01:09.980 storytelling. Really, Deep Space Nine can be credited with sort of the birth of serialized
00:01:15.260 storytelling, what we kind of take for granted now in television, which is that, you know,
00:01:21.020 plots connect with each other from episode to episode and they're long running plot plot lines
00:01:27.020 that had not really been done in a major show at that at this point in America so this is the first
00:01:32.700 time this has happened and imagine that this you know imagine back in the day when we had to watch
00:01:38.080 tv on you know week to week and if you missed an episode well that you're missing a huge chunk of
00:01:44.240 the story that's not a problem today with streaming but it was a problem with Deep Space Nine which
00:01:50.280 kind of gave it, made it a little more difficult for fans to connect to in many ways, because
00:01:54.900 if you missed one episode in the middle of a major plot arc, you might be missing some really key
00:01:59.780 information. On the other hand, we also have the first African-American lead, Commander Benjamin
00:02:06.760 Sisko. He is eventually Captain Benjamin Sisko once they get the Defiant. I know that Ira Bear
00:02:13.000 has often talked about the fact that he thought it was a mistake not making him a captain from
00:02:17.060 the very beginning. It just didn't play well in the series. And Ira Bear really is the main
00:02:23.740 central creative force behind this show. It was obviously co-created by Rick Berman in Boo. We
00:02:29.500 don't like him. And Michael Piller. We do like him. But Michael Piller really kind of just handed
00:02:36.240 the show over to Ira Stephen Bear eventually. And that's Ira there at the bottom on the bottom
00:02:42.440 picture here. I love him just because, like, who dyes their beard and goatee, like, purple? Who
00:02:49.240 does that? It's great. I think it's really interesting that all of this started at a
00:02:53.900 baseball game, which is very fitting to anybody who knows the show. You can see that Cisco is
00:02:59.360 kind of a big baseball fan there. He went to a base, Bear goes to a baseball game with Michael
00:03:05.140 Pillar, and Pillar basically ambushes him with the idea of a new show. Bear had actually left
00:03:12.120 the next generation. He felt like it wasn't a good fit for him. It didn't really work with the
00:03:16.440 ideas that he wanted to put into storytelling. And he was actually really surprised that Pillar
00:03:22.320 was going to give him another chance and try to get him on another show. He was a little skeptical
00:03:26.620 about it. Pillar kind of hands him over the show Bible and he says, read it over. It's going to fit
00:03:32.540 what your sensibilities more. This is the kind of show that you want to do. And he was like, okay,
00:03:37.480 I'm going to take a look at it. And he read the show Bible and he says, I didn't fall in love with
00:03:42.720 it at first sight, but I saw its potential. I knew that I could do something with this story
00:03:48.260 that I could not and had not been allowed to do with the next generation. Another interesting
00:03:53.800 factor about this is that this is the first Star Trek show to be made with essentially no input
00:04:00.060 from Gene Roddenberry. We do know that Rick Bourbon and Michael Piller had talked about it
00:04:06.680 with Roddenberry. Uh, but Roddenberry was extremely, in extremely bad health at this
00:04:11.720 point, was basically at home constantly. And, uh, they went and talked to him about it and he was
00:04:18.280 completely just, he wasn't against it. He wasn't for it. He just really had no reaction to the show
00:04:25.220 at all. Uh, and that's really because he was coming to the end of his life. Uh, I don't,
00:04:29.080 he may not have been all there really in many of these discussions. That's, that's my thought on
00:04:33.960 the subject. And so he really had no, nothing to say, nothing to do with this. And Ira Baer gets
00:04:41.040 a whole lot of creative autonomy as a result of that. So this is a completely big departure from
00:04:49.560 the previous two series. It takes place on a space station rather than a starship. A lot of people
00:04:55.080 said that it kind of had a Western vibe to it, which I think I really agree with. We have kind
00:05:00.160 of the main street there on the promenade. You have Corks, which is the local saloon.
00:05:05.320 You've got the sheriff, Constable Odo. It's got a very kind of western frontier theme
00:05:11.820 running through it. Giving the series a more fixed location was one of the big major differences
00:05:18.440 in the show, but the show also has a lot of darker themes. It features a lot more conflict
00:05:23.260 between the cast members and between the rest of the aliens that they're encountering in
00:05:29.580 show as well uh and it was you know a really really interesting new attempt at storytelling
00:05:36.380 uh robert hewitt wolf who's one of the writers on ds9 said that the entire premise of the show was
00:05:41.980 come to this place take control of it and build it into something better rather than come to a
00:05:46.860 planet have an adventure warp away so you had to kind of stay and and see how things developed in
00:05:53.420 this one spot which changed the storytelling a lot. So we had to bring Star Trek into the real
00:06:03.180 90s right? So I remember when we talked about TNG last week I said that it was kind of a commentary
00:06:08.860 on the boredom that people like Francis Fukuyama had predicted was going to come from the end of
00:06:14.380 the cold war and if that's true about TNG then consider DS9 the bleaker more conflicted 1990s
00:06:22.060 of reality. Because some people might think that the 1990s was boring. And it was, culturally
00:06:27.180 speaking. There was a lot of boredom in the 1990s culture. But on an international and domestic
00:06:33.760 level, there's a lot of things going on. We're going to see the rise of right-wing domestic
00:06:39.700 terrorism in America and things like that. Also, the rise of foreign terrorism in America with the
00:06:46.880 first bombing of the World Trade Center. And so we're going to see a lot of changes going on in
00:06:51.860 American society. So Ira Stephen Bear said that Roddenberry's view of the future in TNG was the
00:06:57.520 Connecticut of the Star Trek series. Everything's clean, white, proper, nothing is messy. It isn't
00:07:03.900 the world that I lived in. And Michael Piller said that Deep Space Nine was made up of conflict on
00:07:08.620 every level that we could find it. They're conflicted with their environment. They're in
00:07:12.220 conflict with each other. And we see that the creators are drawing from very gritty,
00:07:17.400 real conflicts that are going on in the 1990s. Piller specifically said that he had trouble
00:07:23.120 writing the pilot script. He said that in the first draft of the script, our guys essentially
00:07:27.920 come to the Beverly Center Mall in Los Angeles and decide to stay. I thought that was great,
00:07:33.120 and the studio said, we want to open with a shot of the promenade and people gambling.
00:07:37.080 So I wrote it that way, and I realized it didn't work. Sadly though, while I was going through this
00:07:42.240 agonizing process, we had the riots in Los Angeles, and both Rick and I wanted to somehow
00:07:46.840 say something in our show about humanity coexisting and coming together. I had also
00:07:51.320 started thinking that it was not a dramatic situation for a man to come to the Beverly Center.
00:07:55.940 It's not a very dramatic for someone to go to their favorite mall and decide to stay. But for
00:08:00.820 a man who goes to South Central Los Angeles and finds it in ruins and decides to stay, that's
00:08:06.260 dramatic. So I'm going to play the opening, one of the early scenes in the pilot here for you.
00:08:12.320 And just keeping in mind that Deep Space Nine, the station is supposed to be a stand in for LA after the riots.
00:08:21.320 I'm in Station Deep Space Nine, Commander Benjamin Siskel, Stardate 46388.2.
00:08:34.220 At the request of the Majoran Provisional Government, Starfleet has agreed to establish a Federation presence in this system following the withdrawal of the Cardassian Occupational Forces.
00:08:43.580 The first contingent of officers, including my Chief of Operations, Miles O'Brien, arrived two days ago on the Enterprise. 0.94
00:08:51.320 I'm told the Cardassians decided to have some fun the day they left 0.84
00:09:05.940 Four Majorans were killed trying to protect their shops 0.64
00:09:09.060 Why hasn't anybody cleaned this side?
00:09:11.980 We've got all available personnel assigned to repairing primary systems, sir
00:09:15.780 The Cardassians took every component of value 0.99
00:09:18.660 We're virtually defenseless
00:09:21.080 I discussed this with Major Kira, the attaché assigned to you by the Bajoran government.
00:09:26.100 I missed it.
00:09:30.400 What about the civilians who operated these shops?
00:09:33.060 A lot of them lost everything they had.
00:09:34.920 A few are trying to rebuild, but most are packing up to leave.
00:09:39.720 All right, so most of them are packing up to leave.
00:09:41.920 This is a very evocative scene that people would have recognized, having seen the L.A. riots on television,
00:09:48.580 having lived through the LA riots very recently. And so the idea of the utter destruction of your
00:09:57.600 livelihood, people dying, defending their shops, is very much a focused attempt to make this show
00:10:05.820 about modern events. I think one of the absolute best episodes to exemplify how Bear brought DS9
00:10:17.940 into a more gritty version of reality is found in season six episode the episode in the pale
00:10:24.120 moonlight which I will not belabor the point anyone watching this probably knows in the pale
00:10:29.120 moonlight it is a fantastic episode it's probably one of has one of the best monologues in the entire
00:10:35.380 Star Trek franchise and it's one of the most highly rated episodes but the episode was one
00:10:42.080 of the ones that is the most antithetical to the concepts that Gene Roddenberry was trying to do
00:10:47.700 with the original versions of Star Trek and Star Trek The Next Generation. In this episode Captain
00:10:53.260 Sisko is required to weigh his principles against the lives of millions of people and we see him 0.84
00:10:59.540 reacting to the fact that this having a fight with Garak about what has been done to get the Romulans
00:11:07.760 into the war.
00:11:37.760 tragic victims of war. If you could allow your anger to subside for a moment, you'll
00:11:43.860 see that they did not die in vain. The Romulans will enter the war. There's no guarantee of 0.97
00:11:49.880 that. Oh, but I think that there is. You see, when the Tashiar finishes examining the wreckage
00:11:55.080 of Rinax's shuttle, they'll find the burnt remnants of a Cardassian optolytic data rod,
00:11:59.780 which somehow miraculously survived the explosion. After painstaking forensic examination, they'll
00:12:05.100 discover that the rod contains a recording of a high-level dominion meeting at which
00:12:09.580 the invasion of Romulus was being planned. And then they'll discover that it is a fraud! Oh,
00:12:15.760 I don't think they will, because any imperfections in the forgery will appear to be a result of the
00:12:21.480 explosion. So, with a seemingly legitimate rod in one hand and a dead senator in the other,
00:12:28.520 I ask you, Captain
00:12:30.460 What conclusion would you draw? 0.97
00:12:34.500 That Vreenak obtained the rod on Sukkata 0.96
00:12:38.200 And that the Dominion killed him 1.00
00:12:41.280 To prevent him from returning to Romulus with it
00:12:44.280 Precisely
00:12:45.140 And the more the Dominion protests its innocence 1.00
00:12:47.720 The more the Romulans will believe they're guilty 1.00
00:12:50.400 Because it's exactly what the Romulans would have done in their place 1.00
00:12:54.140 That's why you came to me 1.00
00:12:58.320 isn't it captain because you knew i could do those things that you weren't capable of doing
00:13:06.680 well it worked and you'll get what you want a war between the romulans and the dominion
00:13:12.700 and if your conscience is bothering you you should soothe it with the knowledge that you
00:13:17.180 may have just saved the entire alpha quadrant and all it cost was the life of one romulan senator
00:13:24.160 one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer.
00:13:33.500 I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain.
00:13:38.840 Now, Andrew Robinson, who plays Garrick, I really appreciate how invested he was in this character.
00:13:45.020 He's really put a lot of thought into the character.
00:13:47.700 He even wrote an entire book about this character's backstory,
00:13:51.080 which is out of print and very hard to find copies of.
00:13:54.160 But I have a copy of it. Thanks, Chris. So this episode, he says, expose the American innocence,
00:13:59.740 that we want to do these things in the world, but we're not really willing to take the consequences
00:14:03.520 of our actions. It shows us that sometimes we have to do very dirty things and we have to hurt
00:14:08.000 people and we pretend that that doesn't exist and that Americans would never do that. This series
00:14:14.080 is going to take a very harsh stance, looking at war, looking at the police state, looking at
00:14:20.880 at security, uh, and how we approach those things, which is a very interesting take to be going into
00:14:26.640 in the, in the 1990s. I was very prescient in many ways for what was going to happen after 2001
00:14:33.940 with the Patriot Act. And I know, I know those of you know, in the pale moonlight, you're probably
00:14:41.680 like, why are we not watching that one famous monologue from the end? If we have extra time
00:14:46.700 at the end. I'll take us back and we can watch it. It's just not really the point of this episode.
00:14:52.680 It's a great monologue though. So in 1993 Samuel Huntington answers Fukuyama's article about the
00:15:01.940 end of history with his own version of this. He writes a lecture on foreign affairs in 1993
00:15:12.500 called The Clash of Civilizations, also ending it with a question mark. And he's kind of, you know,
00:15:20.260 rebutting Fukuyama's idea that the world is no longer going to have conflict. Huntington sees
00:15:26.420 a future that is just as divided as it has been through the 20th century, only the division is
00:15:31.460 going to be on cultural lines rather than divisions that are based on dividing lines like nation or
00:15:37.780 political ideology so this is going to be an issue that is going to maintain and right wrong or
00:15:43.380 indifferent I mean Huntington wasn't completely wrong right like most of the conflicts that we
00:15:48.820 have had heading into the 21st century were along the lines of cultural and and religious differences
00:15:55.220 whether those be foreign problems or domestic here in the United States so Huntington believed that
00:16:00.820 the age of ideology had ended, but the world is reverting to cultural conflict instead.
00:16:08.820 The primary access of conflict in the future will be along cultural lines
00:16:13.060 because different civilizations are not going to mesh well in this kind of globalized society.
00:16:18.740 So he comes out with six primary reasons in this article that he believes will be the cultural
00:16:27.700 fault lines that are going to cause friction and conflict in our modern world. And the conflict
00:16:33.220 between cultures is at the core of the plot of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. And every one of the six
00:16:40.820 reasons that Huntington gives in his essay can be found in the series. And they almost feel
00:16:46.020 intentionally placed there by the writers and the producers. Michael Piller specifically says
00:16:51.700 at one point that we did politics awfully well, like that this was the point of the show they
00:16:56.900 were talking about politics. Here's the first of these issues that Huntington pulls together.
00:17:04.980 He says, differences among civilizations are too basic in that civilizations are differentiated
00:17:09.700 from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and most importantly, religion.
00:17:14.580 These fundamental differences are the product of centuries and the foundations of different
00:17:18.420 civilizations, meaning they will not be gone soon. Religion becomes one of the primary issues 0.98
00:17:25.140 from the very beginning of the series. The Federation is forced into close contact with 0.98
00:17:30.260 variety of non-Federation planets and races that have values and belief systems that are very
00:17:35.940 different from the ones that are kind of the main core of the humanist kind of atheistic views of
00:17:42.020 the Federation. Religious differences are going to be viewed by Huntington as one of the most
00:17:46.980 critical issues that are going to create cultural conflict and it's going to play a significant
00:17:52.740 role in the conflict here. Peller writes that what we had simply done in creating an environment
00:17:58.660 that brings conflict to our people, which we desperately wanted to do, is to put a group of
00:18:03.140 people with a group of aliens that are different than we are, who had a difference and a conflict
00:18:07.580 with our humanist beliefs. Giving them strong spiritual mystical orbs and prophet worship
00:18:12.400 focused our humanist people to deal with another alien race that is as different from us as the 1.00
00:18:17.320 Klingons are. This is another scene from the pilot episode of the show. You can really see 0.79
00:18:23.440 the discomfort on Sisko's face when dealing with religion. 0.83
00:18:47.320 I apologize for the condition in which we greet you. 0.99
00:19:04.480 The Cardassians.
00:19:06.560 Your arrival has been greatly anticipated.
00:19:12.640 Have you ever explored your PA, Commander?
00:19:15.280 Power
00:19:17.280 A Bajoran draws courage
00:19:20.180 From his spiritual life
00:19:22.060 Our life force
00:19:24.980 Our power
00:19:28.740 Is replenished by the prophets
00:19:32.980 Breathe
00:19:35.320 Kyle Parker
00:19:37.660 If we could discuss
00:19:38.860 Breathe
00:19:39.360 so he's now kind of got wrapped up in this in this religious order which he's not really
00:20:04.060 too excited about he doesn't even really want to be on the on the station in the first place
00:20:08.060 but he specifically is going to get wrapped up in these religious conflicts and religious
00:20:13.380 differences and as a side note I really miss Kai Opaka she was so much better than the next Kai
00:20:19.760 but anyway that's that's a subject for a different lecture
00:20:22.380 then we move on to his next to Huntington's next point where he says the world is becoming a smaller
00:20:30.440 place as a result interactions across the world are increasing which intensifies civilization
00:20:35.540 consciousness and the awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities with
00:20:40.440 civilizations. Now, this kind of comes down to the core issue of globalization being a source of
00:20:47.400 conflict, which we can definitely see as the reality. Michael Piller said, if you look at
00:20:52.800 the years since the original series, it's gotten very crowded in our part of the galaxy. And the
00:20:59.160 second cause of conflict in, in Star Trek, the Star Trek franchise for Deep Space Nine
00:21:04.120 is the wormhole, right? The wormhole makes a, uh, stable transit point between the alpha and
00:21:11.560 gamma quadrant. It creates a easy place for two, for two quadrants of completely different cultures
00:21:18.600 to clash once more, uh, and create an entirely new set of, of conflicts to be dealt with, 0.81
00:21:24.880 which we will see when the show goes into the Dominion Wars, right? They've got an entirely
00:21:29.520 different force on the other side of this wormhole that wants to conquer the galaxy and take over the
00:21:35.080 Alpha Quadrant. Next thing that he is very interested in is fundamentalism, which is
00:21:44.760 different from the concept of religion in a few serious ways, right? He says that due to economic
00:21:51.140 modernization and social change, people are separated from longstanding local identities.
00:21:55.520 Instead, religion has replaced this gap, which provides a basis for identity and commitment
00:21:59.580 that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations. So this is really about religion
00:22:06.300 taking over, religion becoming very fundamentalist. And they spend a lot of time talking about
00:22:12.100 fundamentalist religion in Deep Space Nine. Iris Stephen Bear says that it's one of the things we 0.88
00:22:18.960 talked about, which is the rational scientific bent of the Federation versus the Bajoran
00:22:23.700 spiritual outlook on life, which is a clash, I love that he uses that word, clash, that gave us
00:22:28.840 episodes for quite some time. And Michael Piller, specifically talking about this episode I'm about
00:22:33.760 to play a clip from, said, you start to deal with religion in school, school prayer, the Scopes
00:22:38.720 monkey trial, and fundamentalism, and it was all very thought-provoking. So the Bajoran faith is
00:22:44.560 very integral part of the arc of the series. And in the very first season, we have this woman named
00:22:50.680 Vedic Nguyen, who later becomes Kai Nguyen. I hate her. She's awful. She's the worst. She's a religious 1.00
00:22:58.760 leader and Bajor that's trying to create conflict with the Federation by questioning the education 0.99
00:23:05.080 that the Federation school is giving to children on the space station. Think of her like, you know,
00:23:11.360 some crossover between Moms for Liberty and, uh, and like, I don't know, Christian religious 0.99
00:23:18.620 fundamentalists. Uh, I'm gonna play this particular scene for you here.
00:23:32.120 Now, as we discussed in yesterday's lesson, the wormhole was discovered by Commander Sisko
00:23:38.040 and lieutenant dax earlier this year does anyone know what makes this wormhole so unusual
00:23:46.440 jake it's stable it's stable that's right jake it's the first stable wormhole known to exist
00:23:57.160 please continue a stable wormhole is very important because it allows us to travel
00:24:03.800 secure in the knowledge that neither end will shift locations.
00:24:07.720 Who knows why this wormhole is stable?
00:24:12.500 Because it was artificially constructed.
00:24:15.840 Commander Sisko encountered the entities who created the wormhole when...
00:24:19.860 Excuse me.
00:24:21.420 By entities, do you not mean the prophets?
00:24:25.260 Yes, on Bajor, the entities are worshipped as prophets.
00:24:29.040 Our studies of the wormhole have shown that it was formed by unique particles
00:24:33.360 we call Verterons that are apparently self-sustaining in nature.
00:24:37.960 This begins to explain how a ship at impulse can safely pass through without...
00:24:43.120 Ships are safely guided through the passage by the hands of the prophets.
00:24:48.120 In a manner of speaking?
00:24:50.040 Not apparently in your manner of speaking.
00:24:53.420 Perhaps we should discuss this after class.
00:24:56.280 Do you believe the celestial temple of the prophets exists within the passage?
00:25:01.620 i respect that the bajoran people believe that it does but that's not what you teach
00:25:08.820 no i don't teach bajoran spiritual beliefs that's your job mine is to open the children's
00:25:15.220 minds to history to literature to mathematics to science you are opening the children's minds
00:25:22.240 to blasphemy and i cannot permit it to continue right so you're getting this very it's very much
00:25:30.680 the same discussions that we were having in the 90s, quite frankly, at this point on issues of
00:25:38.840 prayer in school. We were seeing actual Supreme Court cases that were dealing with religion in
00:25:45.220 school, school prayer, things like that at the time. And in fact, Iris Stephen Bear specifically
00:25:49.900 says that this episode they were doing Inherit the Wind. So it's very much a discussion of
00:25:55.100 religion in school and whether or not we're going to value science or value religion
00:26:01.340 in how we teach in public schools.
00:26:07.260 Let me come to Huntington's next point, which is on the kind of the ideas of returning to your
00:26:13.740 roots and being anti-colonial. It says that the growth of civilization consciousness is enhanced
00:26:19.020 by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time,
00:26:24.700 a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. A West at the 0.97
00:26:30.700 peak of its power confronts non-Western countries that increasingly have the desire, the will, 0.75
00:26:35.500 and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways." Essentially what he's saying is that these
00:26:41.340 these countries that have previously been under the control of places like the Soviet Union,
00:26:47.100 places like America, like Great Britain, are now saying, hey, we would like to be free of you. We
00:26:54.300 would like to be able to make our own decisions and not be controlled, no matter how benevolent
00:27:00.380 that control may seem to you. This is another scene from the very first episode from Emissary.
00:27:07.180 In fact, this is probably within the first 15 minutes of the first episode. This episode did
00:27:13.500 such a great job of world building. There are certainly flaws in the episode, but they did a
00:27:17.820 really great job of showing how this was going to go forward. So Wenric Colby, who is a director on
00:27:23.180 on Star Trek said that I like that in DS9 when it came down to the Kira-Cisco conflict, it's
00:27:28.300 politics. But it's the politics of Starfleet of a larger unit that says, we want to expand our
00:27:33.260 influence. And the smaller unit, which is the planet Bajor, which says, hey, it's all very
00:27:38.600 nice, but you're taking over. We don't want you either.
00:27:44.680 I guess it's time to meet Major Kira. 1.00
00:27:47.260 Sir, have you ever served with any Bajoran women?
00:27:50.780 No, why?
00:27:52.100 I was just wondering, sir.
00:27:55.440 They've become meaningless.
00:27:56.900 I just don't agree here.
00:27:58.440 You are throwing it all away.
00:28:01.760 All of you. 1.00
00:28:02.740 You're being a fool. 1.00
00:28:03.740 Well, then, don't ask my opinion next time. 1.00
00:28:09.200 Yes.
00:28:10.300 I'm Benjamin Sisko.
00:28:12.840 I suppose you want the office.
00:28:14.940 Well, I thought I'd say hello first and then take the office.
00:28:18.320 But we could do it in any order you like.
00:28:21.300 hello is something bothering you major you don't want to ask me that commander
00:28:29.280 why not because i have the bad habit of telling the truth
00:28:32.300 even when people don't want to hear it perhaps i want to hear it
00:28:36.480 i don't believe the federation has any business being here the provisional government disagrees
00:28:44.520 with you the provisional government and i don't agree on a lot of things which is probably why
00:28:49.240 they sent me to this godforsaken place. 0.85
00:28:54.000 I have been fighting for Bajoran independence 0.78
00:28:57.000 since I was old enough to pick up a phaser. 1.00
00:29:00.000 We finally drive the Cardassians out, 0.94
00:29:02.080 and what do our new leaders do? 0.52
00:29:03.720 They call up the Federation and invite them right in.
00:29:06.640 The Federation is only here to help us.
00:29:08.880 Yes, I know.
00:29:10.880 The Cardassians said the same thing 60 years ago.
00:29:13.620 All right, so it's a great moment for her character.
00:29:17.260 she is very much a nationalist figure. She has been a freedom fighter her entire life and so
00:29:25.440 she represents this element of Bajorans that want to maintain their own way of life and they fear
00:29:31.460 that the Federation is just another presence that is going to try to colonize and control them
00:29:36.000 the same way the Cardassians did. Only as I phrased it in my master's thesis they would do it in a 0.69
00:29:42.280 gentle way that expected Bajor to be grateful for the opportunity which is really a great
00:29:47.060 commentary on a lot of what America did in a lot of places around the world during the Cold War
00:29:53.320 and into the 90s and early 2000s. One more thing that he is incredibly worried about. The last
00:30:02.240 thing on or one of the last things on the list is cultural characteristics and differences are less
00:30:06.800 mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones.
00:30:12.000 Essentially, he is concerned about the rise of nationalism, which becomes a major plot point in the show as well.
00:30:20.840 So there's a Winrich Colby again writes about this.
00:30:23.560 They said there's nationalism 2000 years from now, and it will always be there because it's something genetically inside us.
00:30:30.140 We only seemingly live in a better social society if we are able to combat it.
00:30:33.880 But the moment we let our guard down, bingo, there's conflict.
00:30:37.520 as somebody living in the year 2025 uh with the rise of nationalism in various ways right now
00:30:45.280 uh this is this really this hits really hard for me and this is one of my this is from the first
00:30:51.940 episode of the second season uh dealing with this concept of the rise of nationalism i was on my
00:30:57.400 way to crossover bridge three to do some repair work in the field modulators but i noticed this
00:31:02.120 this is the emblem of the alliance for global unity they call themselves the circle the circle
00:31:11.020 what gives them the right to mess up our station they're an extremist faction who believe in Bajor
00:31:17.240 for the Bajorans all of the species are inferior and should be expelled from the planet
00:31:22.120 so obviously extremely nationalistic an extremely uh aggressive form of nationalism which even 0.93
00:31:30.060 Kira, I can't really get behind. By season two, she's lost a little bit of her anger towards the
00:31:37.020 Federation. She likes them a little better. At least she likes Cisco better. And this last one
00:31:45.780 is on economic regionalism. I think this is a really important thing to talk about as well in
00:31:50.960 our modern society, where we have to understand that money doesn't work the same in every culture,
00:31:56.000 uh that that you know the cost of living is different in other cultures things like that
00:32:00.360 and he says that economic regionalism is increasing successful economic regionalism
00:32:05.100 will reinforce civilization consciousness economic regionalism may succeed only when
00:32:09.840 it's rooted in a common civilization so basically he's saying that you are going to have communities
00:32:16.420 and cultures that cannot coexist with each other because their economy is so different
00:32:21.580 that they're going to be fighting with each other constantly. Now I will, so remember in TNG way 1.00
00:32:27.300 back in one of those first season episodes, Picard tells people that this is the 24th century,
00:32:32.780 material needs no longer exist. The challenge is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself.
00:32:38.180 And that's all very well and good on Federation Starship, but not every culture in the universe
00:32:43.980 is so enlightened. Not even every culture in the Alpha Quadrant is living that life. The conflict
00:32:49.380 between races that still use money and the Federation are less pronounced in the series
00:32:54.580 than some of the previous examples that I shared with you. Mostly, I believe that that's because
00:33:00.320 I'm not convinced anyone in the writer's room on any Star Trek series has ever so much as taken
00:33:05.500 Economics 101, let alone passed it, but that's an entirely separate topic. But there is definitely
00:33:11.900 some of this conflict there, especially when it comes to episodes that deal with the Ferengi. 0.99
00:33:16.180 profit motive is basically the entire driving force of Ferengi culture and pesky little things
00:33:21.720 like laws have never stopped Quark or any Ferengi from making money which is often going to put him 0.99
00:33:27.260 at odds with Constable Odo. I particularly like this scene. This is also from the second season 0.99
00:33:32.200 first episode. Quark? Not now, Odo. We have to talk. You'll have to wait. It can't wait. Of course not.
00:33:40.200 Make it fast. I have business to attend to.
00:33:44.340 You remember that sub-ite freighter we were discussing the other day?
00:33:47.860 The one you claimed was smuggling defective isolinear rods to Bajor?
00:33:52.640 Yes, yes, what about it?
00:33:53.740 Well, I conducted a little investigation of that freighter, and...
00:33:56.960 Do you know what I discovered?
00:34:01.040 That I was telling the truth.
00:34:06.120 That's right.
00:34:08.000 I arrested the first officer and two of the crew.
00:34:10.920 Congratulations, Constable. I knew you could do it.
00:34:13.720 Now, if you don't mind, I am needed upstairs.
00:34:17.120 Hold on. I'm not finished with you.
00:34:20.800 Oh, really, Odo? Sometimes I think there's no place in you.
00:34:24.940 I help you crack a notorious smuggling ring,
00:34:27.900 and yet you still insist on treating me like the enemy?
00:34:30.740 You are the enemy.
00:34:33.280 Then how do you explain my helping you?
00:34:37.000 that's just it I can't explain it it's simple really I figured we've been at
00:34:45.100 each other's throats long enough it's time we call the truce truce you must be
00:34:51.200 joking ask the sub-first officer if I'm joking from now on you and I are going
00:34:55.600 to be friends you're up to something why would you say that because you're
00:35:02.120 You're always up to something.
00:35:04.880 I can see this is going to take time.
00:35:07.860 But eventually, you'll learn to trust me.
00:35:10.560 Hmm, hmm.
00:35:12.340 That'll be the day.
00:35:22.960 I don't think I can remember Odo ever looking so perplexed.
00:35:29.100 He's not alone. 1.00
00:35:30.280 those sublight smugglers were a potential source for great profit must i go to the 76th rule of 0.98
00:35:36.020 acquisition the 76th every once in a while the clappies it confuses the hell out of their enemies 0.92
00:35:43.580 all right so he's all about making money but he's also all about confusing people and creating
00:35:48.960 you know conflict chaos uh by not letting people know where he's headed what he's doing
00:35:54.800 uh and i like this particular scene as well that which also shows the conflict between people with
00:36:00.000 the money and people who don't believe in money.
00:36:30.000 philosophy we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity what does that mean exactly it
00:36:36.060 means it means we don't need money well if you don't need money then you certainly don't need
00:36:45.020 mine right so he's not gonna he's not about to hand over his money to jake uh for a baseball
00:36:53.020 card which is what he's trying to buy for his father's birthday i think i think it was a birthday
00:36:56.940 present. So yes, this conflict, like I said, it's not as obvious. It doesn't run through the series
00:37:04.820 themes quite as much as the other five things that Huntington lists off, but it is there.
00:37:11.120 There is economic regionalism that is a conflict point in the show. I'm sure there would have been
00:37:17.940 more of that if anyone in the writer's team really understood economics. There are so many
00:37:23.320 questions I have about the economic system of the Starfleet, uh, Star Trek universe that I will
00:37:29.080 probably never have answered, sadly. Uh, but this is one of those problems that pops up.
00:37:35.940 So Alexander Siddick, who played Dr. Bashir in the show, said that DS9 was the true sci-fi baby
00:37:41.260 of the Star Trek world because it explored difficult things that normally people don't
00:37:45.520 want to talk about because they find it uncomfortable. Politics, religion. So in this
00:37:50.680 section of the lecture pretty much I just want to do kind of a case study of individual episodes
00:37:55.080 and how they dealt with major contemporary issues of the time. So the pilot is a key example of how
00:38:02.500 the writing staff were taking their cues from world events because it is based on more or less
00:38:08.140 the 1992 Los Angeles riots that were occurring and it was very important. It was doubly poignant
00:38:14.220 to use the Los Angeles Rodney King riots as an inspiration for that episode because it was the
00:38:20.540 first episode of Star Trek to have an African American lead in it. So it was a very important
00:38:25.520 moment for that. And that issue of race is going to become kind of a key driving force for Sisko's
00:38:32.480 character in many episodes. The casting of Avery Brooks as Captain Sisko was really going to bring
00:38:38.480 the issue of race to the forefront in a way that had never been covered in Gene Roddenberry's reign.
00:38:43.380 Now, obviously, Roddenberry was more egalitarian about this. He had Black characters who were doing important roles. But for Roddenberry, the issue of race was something that he thought would be inconsequential by the 24th century. In his opinion, the role of the Black man was no different from the role of anybody else.
00:39:03.420 But Michael Piller, Ira Baer, and Avery Brooks took a very different look at this. They felt that it was very essential to talk about contemporary issues of race in America, especially given the ongoing racial climate in America in the 1990s.
00:39:17.400 And so the most prominent example of this is the episode in season six called Far Beyond the Stars. It's directed by Avery Brooks himself. And in this episode, we have this kind of alternate universe where it's set in New York City in the 1950s.
00:39:35.260 and it centers around the cast of Deep Space Nine, all being humans who are working at a science
00:39:41.160 fiction magazine called Incredible Tales. You can't see it behind me. I have my background
00:39:45.740 blacked out, but I actually have a poster that is the cover of the fictional magazine because I love
00:39:52.280 this episode so much. And they are, Captain Sisko plays a character called Benny Russell,
00:39:57.980 who is an African-American writer for the magazine. He writes a short story called Deep Space Nine,
00:40:03.040 it's very meta, featuring a black captain on a space station. And this episode really centers
00:40:09.360 around the struggle for civil rights, deals with issues of racism, police brutality,
00:40:14.880 major topic, of course, on everybody's mind, even six years after the Rodney King incident.
00:40:21.680 And Brooks says that this episode was the most important moment for me in the entire seven years
00:40:28.240 of the series. He really, really loved this episode, and I also really love it. I clearly
00:40:35.100 love it because I named my master's thesis, I titled my master's thesis after a quote from
00:40:41.240 this episode, which was, you can pulp a story, but you cannot destroy an idea, which really fit what
00:40:47.500 I was trying to do with my thesis here. I'm going to play you real quick this scene. If I disappear
00:40:54.280 off screen it's because i needed a tissue the scene always really gets me um so here we go
00:41:03.160 it's about time
00:41:07.960 douglas magazine there isn't any magazine not this month anyway
00:41:14.840 mr stone had the entire run pulped he can't do that oh he can and he did he believes quote
00:41:22.200 Quote, this issue did not live up to our usual high standards, unquote.
00:41:27.380 Oh, well, what's that supposed to mean?
00:41:29.940 It means he didn't like it.
00:41:34.260 Which means the public will simply have to get along without any incredible tales this month.
00:41:40.900 What exactly is it that he did not like?
00:41:43.180 The artwork, the layout?
00:41:47.000 What high standards is he talking about?
00:41:50.220 it's about my story isn't it that's what this is all about he didn't want to publish my story 0.80
00:42:00.720 and we all know why because my hero is a colored man hey this magazine belongs to mr stone if he
00:42:08.120 doesn't want to publish this month we don't publish this month end of story that doesn't
00:42:11.340 make it right and you know it don't tell me what i know besides it's not about what's right it's
00:42:18.600 about what is.
00:42:21.640 And I'm afraid
00:42:22.620 I've got some more
00:42:23.400 bad news for you, Benny.
00:42:24.680 Mr. Stone has decided
00:42:25.860 that your services
00:42:27.080 are no longer required here.
00:42:28.960 What?
00:42:30.100 You're firing me?
00:42:31.500 I have no choice, Benny.
00:42:33.420 It's his decision.
00:42:35.940 Well,
00:42:37.060 you can't fire me.
00:42:39.480 I quit. 1.00
00:42:40.800 To hell with you! 1.00
00:42:43.600 And to hell with... 1.00
00:42:44.940 No!
00:42:46.160 Try to stay calm, Benny.
00:42:47.900 No!
00:42:48.600 I'm tired of being calm. Calm never got me a damn thing. 0.83
00:42:52.260 I'm warning you, Benny. If you don't stop this, I'm going to call the police. 0.92
00:42:55.680 You go ahead. Call them.
00:42:58.220 Call anybody you want. They can't do anything to me.
00:43:01.460 Not anymore. And Lord, can't any of you.
00:43:10.300 I'm a human being, damn it. 0.99
00:43:15.080 You can't deny me all you want. 0.99
00:43:18.600 but you cannot deny ben cisco exist that future at space station all those people they exist
00:43:27.480 in here in my mind i created it and every one of you know it you read it it's here you you hear what
00:43:38.920 i'm telling you you can pop a story but you cannot destroy an idea don't you understand
00:43:46.680 that's ancient knowledge you cannot destroy an idea so he has a major breakdown here obviously
00:43:54.600 this is a very intense episode of of the series he'd already had a variety of breakdowns dealing
00:44:01.320 with police brutality and being beaten by the cops and things like that earlier in
00:44:06.040 the episodes this was kind of his breaking point as far as character is concerned
00:44:10.120 another thing that they dealt with was the issue of homelessness uh and kind of the way that we
00:44:21.220 treat the lesser uh the less privileged people in our society ira stephen bear uh right was
00:44:28.480 integral to writing these episodes past tense part one and part two which were uh season three
00:44:33.620 episode 11 and 12 um is and he writes about this so the frightening thing is that when we started
00:44:39.900 shooting in LA. The mayor at the time, Richard Reardon, came out and said something like,
00:44:44.700 we want to take part of the factory district and throw people in camps. That proposal or remark
00:44:49.620 was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. And everyone on the show went insane when they
00:44:54.820 saw that. Here we were shooting this thing and it could have actually happened. I don't think
00:44:59.580 we showed anything in that episode that wasn't a very possible future for this country. So yeah,
00:45:05.760 I actually had to hunt it down. I went through the Los Angeles Times archives until I found the
00:45:10.320 episode. And there's the headline right there, written October 14th, 1994, 12 a.m. Pacific Time,
00:45:19.120 Homeless Camp Wade in LA Industrial Area. So the episodes Past Tense Part 1 and Part 2
00:45:25.680 deal with time travel shenanigans, because you're always going to have time travel shenanigans in
00:45:30.480 Star Trek no matter what. This one is a little less fun than some of the other time travel episodes
00:45:35.280 that we get. Crew members get sent back to San Francisco in 2024 to a key point in Earth's
00:45:42.100 history. At this point in Earth's history, all the homeless, the mentally ill, the unemployed 0.99
00:45:47.020 have been corralled into something called sanctuary districts to keep them off the streets.
00:45:51.620 Ira Bear specifically said the inspiration for this episode, they had already written this episode
00:45:56.360 when the LA camps were mentioned by Richard Reardon. The actual motivation for writing the
00:46:03.720 episode was seeing all the homeless people in Santa Monica who I call called living statues
00:46:09.860 because people used to step over them. They're right there overlooking the ocean and people are
00:46:14.560 lying there in the grass and there are people taking pictures of the ocean and literally
00:46:17.960 stepping over the homeless. This general ability to simply ignore the problems of society and act
00:46:24.180 like they couldn't see them is really summed up by something that Bashir says in this particular
00:46:28.660 scene. 0.52
00:46:58.660 damn they've just given up the social problems they face seem too enormous to deal with that 0.99
00:47:07.540 only makes things worse causing people to suffer because you hate them it's terrible but causing 0.99
00:47:14.660 people to suffer because you have forgotten how to care it's really hard to understand
00:47:21.460 they'll remember it will take some time and it won't be easy but eventually people in this
00:47:29.460 century will remember i care unfortunately it didn't happen in 2024 in our our world uh we're
00:47:36.240 still dealing with that right now we're still dealing with and pardon me for getting modern
00:47:40.860 political on this but uh we're still dealing with the fact that people do not care they do not care
00:47:45.960 about others fundamentally and we're watching that play out right now in 2025. So it's kind
00:47:51.920 of a frustrating thing that the 90s Star Trek had some high hopes for us and we have not
00:47:58.060 lived up to them as we tend to do with sci-fi. Another major important factor that was discussed
00:48:05.360 in season four was in episodes Homefront and Paradise Lost, episodes 11 and 12. It really
00:48:12.140 dealt with contemporary political and civil liberty issues and could very well represent
00:48:18.140 every possible future for America, just as past tense had done. It dealt with the paranoia brought
00:48:24.460 on by the threat of invasion by foreign powers. In this case, it's the shape-shifting founders from
00:48:29.100 the gamma quadrant who are trying to come into the alpha quadrant and take over and how that fear is
00:48:34.780 used to justify limiting civil liberties. Keep in mind, this is in the aftermath of the 1993
00:48:41.980 World Trade Center bombing. Issues of foreign terrorism are becoming increasingly a factor
00:48:47.680 in discussions of national security at the time. Of course, we also had things like the
00:48:51.640 Oklahoma City bombing. So that was also an issue that was being covered as well, domestic
00:48:55.820 terrorism. But the threat of foreign terrorism is really what was scaring people and increasingly
00:49:01.940 becoming a discussion point on how we balance security and civil liberties for the American
00:49:07.720 public. So Robert Wolfe, one of the writers for these episodes, said that the question of this
00:49:13.520 episode is, if the United States becomes a fascist state to fight fascism, would that be worth it?
00:49:19.400 I thought it was an important show that demonstrated that the best of governments
00:49:22.620 had to be watched. You can't allow our fear of outside forces or interior threats to chop away
00:49:27.940 at our own democratic institutions. And Cisco puts it very succinctly in this episode.
00:49:36.480 Then why did you bring me here? 0.98
00:49:38.300 Because I needed someone who knew how to fight shapeshifters, and that's you. 1.00
00:49:43.740 And I suppose on some level I hope that when you saw what we were accomplishing, you'd join us. 0.99
00:49:50.620 And you've always had a strong sense of duty.
00:49:53.420 My duty is to protect the Federation.
00:49:55.860 That's what we're trying to do.
00:49:57.740 What you're trying to do is to seize control of Earth and place it under military rule.
00:50:03.240 If that's what it takes to stop the Dominion.
00:50:05.860 So you're willing to destroy paradise in order to save it?
00:50:11.620 Destroying paradise in order to save it, right?
00:50:13.860 Becoming a security state in order to protect the safety and security of the Federation.
00:50:21.220 But that destroys what the Federation stands for.
00:50:24.240 Somebody send this video to, I don't know, Trump?
00:50:28.200 I don't think he'd get it.
00:50:29.980 but we can all take a lesson from this. I think it's really funny. I have used this episode to
00:50:36.100 talk about the 90s with classes that I have taught on this period of time. And it's really funny
00:50:43.940 because I start talking about the security state and the fear of foreign terrorism and things like
00:50:47.720 that. And I've had students go, this is way too early for that, right? Like 2001 hadn't happened,
00:50:54.260 9-11 hadn't happened yet. And I was like, yeah, 9-11 isn't the first time we've had instances of
00:50:59.800 foreign terrorism in the United States. That was just kind of the height of the terror, 0.91
00:51:06.340 the height of this concern. We'll talk about that more when we get to Enterprise.
00:51:13.780 Another thing that the show did a really good job of covering was the issues of the costs of war,
00:51:19.380 uh that these are that war is bad war is traumatizing and this they really did a much
00:51:26.420 better job of dealing with this than the next generation ever did uh we didn't really talk a
00:51:31.720 lot about wolf 359 and we talked about the next generation um but we when you look at those
00:51:38.880 episodes picard is assimilated into the collective of the borg they get him out and then basically
00:51:45.400 they never address it again as far as the psychological damage and toll that that took 0.66
00:51:50.100 on him. You know, it comes out a little bit here and there in the series, but they never really
00:51:54.760 deal with the PTSD and the trauma of that directly in the show. DS9 is not going to take that tack
00:52:03.000 at all. And this scene here is actually from the documentary on Deep Space Nine, which is really,
00:52:09.540 really great. I also have a quote here from a Star Trek fan. Uh, he was quoted in one of the
00:52:15.140 books that I used extensively when I was writing this thesis, which is, uh, if I have my copy of
00:52:21.360 it out, I do, uh, The 50-Year Mission, which is, uh, The Next 25 Years from the Next Generation
00:52:27.900 to J.J. Abrams, which was put together by Mark Altman and Edward Gross. Uh, fantastic book if
00:52:33.200 you, like, really want to dig into the history of these shows. Uh, they also have one on the
00:52:37.220 original series. I said that long before America became well associated with religious extremism
00:52:42.240 and suicide bombers, we saw that on DS9. We saw the toll of battle and the casualty figures coming
00:52:47.640 in on the faces of the characters. And we saw them in the midst of deep, desperate battle,
00:52:52.120 the loss of limbs, and the struggle to recover. Episodes like The Sacrifice of Angels and The
00:52:58.320 Siege of AR-558 resonate in my consciousness. They are familiar, certainly, but because they
00:53:04.260 take place in an imaginary future far from here. They are not too close, but just close enough to
00:53:08.800 be cathartic and helpful without tearing me apart. He talks also about how he has, you know,
00:53:13.900 worked with other veterans, the VA, who have really found this show to be very comforting and very
00:53:18.900 healing for them. But I'm going to play a little clip here from the documentary.
00:53:23.060 Highly recommend watching it. It's great.
00:53:24.940 We really spoke about nuances of war that people don't know.
00:53:30.840 Deep Space Nine had the guts to have an episode with Nog losing his leg.
00:53:34.260 I can't tell you how many times a veteran has come up to me and they would say,
00:53:49.620 that show, that show helped me. It helped me when I came back. It helped me get through,
00:53:55.780 you know, whatever the individual was dealing with. And that's powerful.
00:54:01.080 If I can get shot, if I can lose my leg, anything can happen to me, Vic.
00:54:09.500 If I stay here, at least I know what the future is going to be like. 1.00
00:54:14.520 You stay here, you're going to die.
00:54:18.440 Not all at once, but little by little. 0.98
00:54:23.200 Eventually you become as hollow as I am.
00:54:28.240 There's some fantastic episodes.
00:54:29.900 I really highly recommend, if you haven't watched the show, I highly doubt that any of you in this particular lecture haven't watched it.
00:54:36.280 But The Siege of AR-558 and It's Only a Paper Moon are two fantastic episodes dealing with war and PTSD.
00:54:44.800 Now I want to just go ahead and talk about some honorable mentions.
00:54:48.360 These are not, I'm not really going to play scenes necessarily from these episodes, but I just really like the way that they dealt with issues of society in them.
00:54:57.020 duet is the 19th episode of uh of the show it's in the very first season it's uh deals with a
00:55:05.880 man who is being is compelled to confront an apparent cardassian war criminal who might be
00:55:11.260 lying about his identity uh it actually is based on uh it was originally titled the higher law and
00:55:17.700 it resembled an actual existing dramatization based on the nuremberg trials it had reference
00:55:22.700 to Robert Shaw as the man in the glass booth, which tells of a Jewish man who is accused of
00:55:27.080 being a Nazi war criminal. But what I really love about this episode is how much it allowed Kira's
00:55:33.480 character to evolve and kind of deal with her own emotions about the Cardassian occupation and all
00:55:41.160 of the violence that had occurred there. She really has a chance to grow and it shows a lot
00:55:46.800 nuance on the issues of what's going on in the conflict in the show. Another great honorable
00:55:54.480 mention is, of course, Rejoined. This was season four, episode five. It is one of the first
00:56:00.240 televised lesbian kisses to ever be on network television. So following up on the original 0.99
00:56:09.200 series, having one of the first interracial kisses to ever be televised, we get into this with
00:56:15.840 Deep Space Nine. It was the 78th total episode of the show. It was aired in 1995. It received a
00:56:22.880 record number, record volume of feedback from viewers both positive and negative. There were
00:56:28.560 a lot of people that had problems with this episode. I believe one person who worked at the
00:56:33.280 studio was quoted as saying that she got a call from somebody complaining about the episode.
00:56:38.640 It was a father saying that he had trouble explaining this to his children and she
00:56:43.520 specifically asked him would you have had a problem with it about this if one of the women
00:56:49.120 had shot the other like it wasn't a kiss it was a shooting and he said no i wouldn't have had a
00:56:54.160 problem with that and she was like i think you need to think about who's screwing up your kids
00:56:57.760 because it's not us right uh you're the problem here buddy uh it's a great episode i am still a
00:57:04.240 little bit you know peeved that we we got this kiss but we never got what we all wanted from
00:57:09.280 the show, which was Garrick and Bashir. And yes, I know about the Lower Decks episode. It doesn't
00:57:14.080 count. It's not the same characters. One of them is from an alternate universe. It doesn't count.
00:57:18.960 That was a cop out on their part. But if you watch the entire documentary on Deep Space Nine,
00:57:25.840 you will find out some things. Both Alexander and Andrew were totally in it. They were ready to go
00:57:34.800 for it. Ira Baer wanted to make them a gay couple. We could have had Bashir and Garrick for real,
00:57:39.760 but the 90s stopped us. And I will be salty about that for forever.
00:57:46.000 And one more honorable mention that I want to talk about here is not just one episode,
00:57:51.280 it is every episode that features Benjamin and Jake, father and son duo. I'm going to play you
00:57:57.600 another scene here from the documentary because it really covers this issue.
00:58:03.040 will what was your favorite mission been on in deep space nine my favorite mission
00:58:09.280 my favorite mission was raising jake come on come on man
00:58:17.760 blue light is on and it's fading away and it's fading away and it's fading away
00:58:22.480 i realized the significance and importance of the small things that we did that
00:58:48.480 avery was aware of i didn't realize it at the time but it was important for him to set the
00:58:54.240 precedent for a black man raising a child being there being a father being involved in his child's
00:59:00.560 life having that as his primary concern in life it was a reality of the disproportionate 0.55
00:59:08.000 disproportionate number of brown male children without father figures etc so it was very
00:59:16.560 important to me that that relationship you know remains strong he was creating a role model for
00:59:23.920 people to follow particularly african-american men in terms of how to treat your son i thought
00:59:31.680 that he did such an outstanding job with the creation of his relationship with jake the bond
00:59:37.600 that the two of them had off camera i thought for a moment that avery was his daddy because they had
00:59:46.080 such a wonderful strength together when we weren't working he'd take me to a basketball game he took
00:59:52.400 me to my first lakers game uh introduced me to jerry buss and magic johnson and introduced me as
00:59:58.800 his son with his son you know this these are my children that's how he would you know introduce me
01:00:05.760 and um i felt like part of his family i felt the love i still feel that way he hasn't let go at
01:00:13.440 all. We still maintain a very close relationship. So it's a very special relationship. One of the
01:00:20.160 things that Avery Brooks really insisted upon in the show, he wanted to make sure that he was
01:00:26.280 portraying a very strong parent-child bond between the characters because he believed that the
01:00:33.620 relationship was something important to be shown on television. He specifically said in an interview
01:00:39.140 in 2012, that was something else you still don't often see on air, at least as it concerns black
01:00:44.340 and brown men and their sons. We got to play complicated, emotional, and intricate scenes,
01:00:48.820 and we got to have tender and fun moments. It wasn't a pat relationship or an easy one,
01:00:53.300 but, and it was very realistic. Uh, and so Cyril Lofton who played Jake was actually the, he was,
01:00:58.820 his parents were going through a divorce at the time that he began, began playing this role.
01:01:03.300 And so Avery Rooks really stepped in as kind of a father figure for him in reality, as well as in
01:01:09.860 the show, which was very important for him. So it's a great, great commentary that they were
01:01:16.020 able to put into this. So I just want to talk a little bit about DS9's legacy. So while Gene
01:01:24.100 Roddenberry's Star Trek vision was rooted in kind of this very far-flung utopian idea, DS9 wanted to
01:01:32.060 ask harder questions. It delved into the grittier realities of what it meant to build and maintain
01:01:37.720 a future like the one Roddenberry wanted. He was really challenging many of the idealistic
01:01:43.740 assumptions that Roddenberry and some of the earlier writers had had because it really fit
01:01:49.680 better into our very complex world that we actually live in. It's not some far-flung dream,
01:01:55.340 it's how do we get there? So DS9, like I said, explores themes of compromise, manipulation,
01:02:02.300 the cost of security, and it challenges the idea that Roddenberry had that humans will just
01:02:09.200 unflinchingly progress morally into the future, right? It's going to take more work than Roddenberry
01:02:16.660 really portrayed in his shows. So for many fans and critics, this willingness to depict the
01:02:22.120 Federation's flaws made the series feel so much more relatable, especially to this kind of post
01:02:27.780 Cold War period, which was full of so much uncertainty in the global world. So it really
01:02:37.000 did amazing things for the entire story series of telling stories on television with serialized
01:02:45.420 storytelling. It was very groundbreaking for its time. Shows like The Expanse, Game of Thrones,
01:02:50.500 Battlestar Galactica owe a huge debt to DS9's trailblazing format because we would not really
01:02:56.980 have gotten that kind of storytelling without this. This was really them taking a chance.
01:03:03.860 DS9 also was not afraid to tackle deeply political issues like religion, nationalism,
01:03:10.100 all things that we are still dealing with today that we have not solved yet. But they gave us
01:03:16.580 kind of a blueprint for talking about it and using sci-fi to talk about these things in a very gritty
01:03:23.460 realistic way and we also get to question a lot of things like the Federation's role as a benevolent
01:03:30.260 force which was a question that really needed to be raised in the post-cold war era of what
01:03:35.380 America's you know part in the world was and how we should be interacting with other countries it
01:03:42.180 it was a question that really needed to be asked. So today, we still have these issues. We still
01:03:47.220 have nationalism on a huge scale. We still have economic inequality on a huge scale.
01:03:52.260 Religious fundamentalism is a hugely major issue in America right now, obviously, with Christian 0.57
01:03:57.860 nationalism on a upward growth as far as control is concerned in American society.
01:04:05.100 The erosion of civil liberties, it's a big topic. And the series didn't offer any easy answers.
01:04:10.620 but it addressed those issues and it willingly embraced kind of the gray areas and made it
01:04:17.360 probably I think one of the most thought-provoking entries in the entire franchise. DS9 was really
01:04:23.620 overshadowed by the next gen. It was overshadowed by Voyager. Like I said it was the red-headed
01:04:27.980 stepchild. It was the middle kid. Gets ignored the entire time but it still was incredibly important 0.81
01:04:34.700 and I think it deserves a lot more than it got. It didn't get any movies. It didn't get anywhere
01:04:39.680 near the acclaim that anybody else that any of the other shows got uh but ds9 really reminds us
01:04:45.520 that even in the future starships warp drives all those amazing things that we can get out of the
01:04:51.200 future with technological advancements we still have to keep a wary eye on these these negative
01:04:58.880 parts of humanity uh our flaws and kind of keep those under control because if we just assume
01:05:05.760 they'll go away, they'll sneak up on us. Okay, so now it is time for any questions. So I know
01:05:13.600 everybody likes this series a lot. I did not cover nearly as many episodes as I probably would have
01:05:18.800 liked to. But you know, I'm not going to keep you here for hours and hours. So if anybody has
01:05:23.520 questions about particular episodes, feel free to put them in the chat or unmute and ask.