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Notes -
I've been catching up on some Star Trek since I was a teen when a lot of these aired. And holy cannoli the first episode of DS9 has to be the heaviest ever.
Sisko is assigned to DS9 and is meeting with Picard about it. Sisko expresses this assignment isn't to his preference and Picard starts giving him the "Starfleet duty" lecture and Sisko erupts in his face saying to cut him some fucking slack, he is raising a kid by himself because his mother died on a ship that he helped the Borg destroy when he was Locutus. 🤯
Despite also popping Picard's bubble he makes it clear that he's not some career obsessed owned-Starfleet loser who uses it as an excuse to never start a family.
In addition to rebuking Picard, he's also a sensitive enough black man that he can cry on camera (while the wormhole entities ask him why he dwells on the memory of his wife's death) but he is still hard ass enough to blackmail a ferengi into keeping his shop open in exchange for not putting his nephew in prison.
A very different Trek.
It's interesting that all the 90s era Star Trek shows seem to follow this pattern: A great pilot episode, then a weak season 1, then gradually improve over time. I agree with you that the pilot of DS9 is a great, and I love most of the show, but season 1 was unfortunately a mess.
Normally I think network TV follows the opposite problem. The pilot episode is a mess, everything is crammed into too little time since they're basically establishing and advertising the entire show. They're not even sure if it's going to be produced yet, so they don't want to put too much money into it, and the actors are all still learning their role. If it does get produced, I usually like the rest of season 1 the best, since that's when the writers and producers can really put into place the ideas they had that inspired the show. But then if its good and gets renewed, it tends to go down in quality over time, since they run out of ideas and feel a need to continuously escalate and "jump the shark."
90s Star Trek was really something else. I miss it so much.
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