Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 2
I’m sure everyone’s got their favorite season of a given show, but for me, Deep Space Nine never got better than its second season. In a lot of ways, this is the last season of the show that I enjoyed from premiere to finale. Everything in the second year was rock solid, damn good storytelling, excellent empire building, and compelling characterization. With later seasons’ introduction of such elements as the Defiant and Worf, it just seems to me like DS9 got too far away from its roots. This was the show at its absolute greatest potential.
And the action! At the time this season premiered (late 1993), the Star Trek franchise had never witnessed anything like the second year’s opening three-parter. (Technically, I’ve always included the stage-setting season one finale In The Hands Of The Prophets and considered the whole thing a four-parter.) There’s no instant Trek reset button here (we do suffer from a rather quick resolution in The Siege, though it’s not a bloodless one), and in fact the “to be continued” jeopardy is ratcheted up from episode to episode quite nicely. Outstanding performances from Trek’s best ensemble cast, finally finding their footing, make this trilogy an absolute joy to watch - these three episodes are next only to Emissary and The Visitor as DS9’s finest hours, and they’re a clear precursor to the nicely-planned multi-part stories that have become the norm on Star Trek: Enterprise as of its fourth season.
Invasive Procedures rolls out some information about the Trills, and provides us with one of the all-time great Avery Brooks action scenes as Sisko head-butts a Klingon (who also happens to be future Voyager regular Tim Russ) in hand-to-hand combat (that’s gotta hurt). One of the better guest casts to grace an early episode, including Megan Gallagher and the wonderfully weird John Glover, rounds things out, though the one thing that really jumps out is that it’s Quark who allows the whole thing to happen, and we really don’t get any clear idea of how he’s going to be punished, if at all, for this.
Necessary Evil is the next standout episode, a story that calls for a re-assessment of both Kira and Odo for their actions during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor and the early days of the station. Sanctuary often goes overlooked, but it marks both an early mention of the Dominion, and offers a deeply affecting “we don’t want their kind around here” social parable that would have done the late Gene Roddenberry proud. Later in the season, we get the all-time classic Blood Oath, a full-on homage to the original series’ Klingon baddies, complete with the original actors (now in the same makeup as any other modern-day Klingon) in an epic, almost operatic tale of revenge and redemption.
The home stretch toward the end of the season is full of top-notch stories, with The Wire both illuminating and obscuring Garak’s backstory; The Collaborator (written by Gary Holland, whose day job at Paramount was to write the “coming up next week” promos for DS9 and Next Generation), which once again muddies the waters of the resistance movement on Bajor; Tribunal, which sees O’Brien subjected to the Cardassian court system in a way that almost made Picard’s Cardassian capture seem like The People’s Court; and The Jem’Hadar, which begins to introduce us to the bad guys who will threaten DS9 for the rest of the series’ run. Knockout, take-no-prisoners episodes all. I remember the golden days of seeing DS9 on Saturday nights and Babylon 5 on Sunday nights, and thinking this was one of the best stretches of really good SF that I’d ever seen on TV. And looking back now, I realize just how right I was about that.
Not that there aren’t misfires in DS9’s second season. Second Sight went through so many changes between the page and the stage that I had to read an interview with its writer, published after the fact, to figure out what the hell it was really all about. Rivals is similarly muddled in its attempt to show the dark side of the same race of “Listeners” of which the Enterprise’s Guinan was a member. The two-part Maquis saga is really just there to lay the groundwork for Voyager’s Chakotay character, but in retrospect it doesn’t do much for me on DS9 (despite Bernie Casey’s fine guest starring turn as an old friend of Sisko and a Starfleet officer on the brink of betraying his oath). Profit And Loss, despite the insistence of all involved that it wasn’t just an attempt to do Casablanca on DS9, smacks of exactly that. And Playing God is a lot of fun - I like it quite a bit, actually - but it’s not something that couldn’t have been done on Next Generation.
The bonus features this time around focus on the emerging storyline and the various actors’ parts in something that was increasingly becoming a full-fledged saga. The barely-hidden Section 31 Files Easter eggs give many of the show’s supporting players and behind-the-scenes regulars a chance to speak out, including director David Livingston’s confession that his 60s-Batman-series-ish Dutch angles met with great reluctance up and down the show’s production hierarchy when it came time to venture into the Mirror Universe. The Section 31 clips are some of the coolest features - they say their piece and get off the stage, usually in less than three minutes.
A dandy set of one of the best seasons I’ve seen of any Trek series. Highest recommendations.