The movie
"To boldly go where no one
has gone before" is the Star Trek motto, and in its fifth season, Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine continues its foray into uncharted dramatic
territory. As DS9 Season 5 opens, the reassuring idea of the Federation
as an infallible, and indestructible organization is turned upside down:
between war with the unseen and vastly superior forces of the Dominion, and the
Klingons breaking their alliance and making a naked move to expand the Klingon
Empire, Starfleet's resources are stretched very thin indeed.
That vulnerability is in fact
the theme behind many of the episodes in Season 5. I've noted before that DS9
has a darker feel than either Next Generation or the original Star Trek, and in
Season 5 we definitely see that mood continuing. DS9 is operating under the
shadow of war, and it shows. In "Let He Who Is Without Sin", for
instance, we have a fairly minor story focusing on character relationships, as
Dax and Worf head to Risa for a vacation; however, this story is interwoven
with Worf's involvement with a group that is convinced that the Federation has
become decadent and vulnerable to attack by its enemies... and in DS9
those enemies are very concretely the Klingons and the Dominion. DS9 is
also subtly opening up Star Trek's view of what it's like to be in the
Federation; while in earlier shows we see the Federation as a completely stable
society, threatened only by outside attack, here we discover that there is
dissent within the citizenry of the Federation as well.
The conflicts established in
previous seasons continue to develop in Season 5. In "For the
Uniform" and later "Blaze of Glory," Season 4's excellent plot
thread involving Commander Eddington and the Maqui is reopened. Major
developments also occur in the Dominion war, throughout the season: we get
"In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light" toward the
middle of the season, and more developments in the season-ending "In the
Cards" and "A Call to Arms." In addition to the major
plot-moving episodes, many of the "stand-alone" episodes link up in
some way with the larger Klingon/Dominion story arc. For instance, "...Nor
the Battle to the Strong," in which Dr. Bashir and Jake Sisko give medical
aid to a hospital in a war zone, could easily have taken place on "random
planet of the week" with an alien race besieged by another alien race...
but it happens on a Federation colony under attack by the Klingons. It's a
small detail, but one that adds considerably to the flavor of the episode.
The Bajoran situation, which
had been pushed somewhat to the back in Season 4, is brought into the story to
good effect in episodes like "Things Past," in which Sisko, Odo, Dax,
and Garak are mysteriously thrown back in time to a Cardassian-occupied DS9, as
well as "Rapture," "The Darkness and the Light," and
"Ties of Blood and Water," with that last episode also linking into
other plot threads as well.
DS9 may have a fairly
dark tone (for Star Trek) overall, but Season 5 also has the famous
comic episode "Trials and Tribble-ations." The episode is a
computer-graphics marvel, seamlessly inserting the DS9 crew into actual
footage from 1967's original-series episode "The Trouble with
Tribbles," and on top of that, the episode works very well as a story.
It's a complete riot, starting with the incongruity of seeing DS9
characters in "original Star Trek" uniforms (and hairdos...
every little details is hilariously correct) thrown into the futuristic retro
look of the original series, and continuing with an assortment of very funny
incidents throughout the episode. (The scene in which Worf is questioned about
the odd-looking "Klingons" of the time is simply priceless.)
Possibly more so than earlier
seasons, Season 5 is best appreciated if you know the background of the
situation and characters. For instance, some of the early episodes jump right
into the developing relationship between Dax and Worf, which makes a lot more
sense in the context of their interactions in Season 4. Star Trek has
always been a character-focused series, even at its most adventurous, and DS9
is no exception. In addition to Dax and Worf, we also get a reasonable amount
of attention paid to the other characters, including Odo and Chief O'Brien. In
the latter case, admittedly one of the weaker sub-plots of Season 5 is the
continued "soap opera" of Kira carrying O'Brien's baby, but the
writers can't really be faulted for that: they did their best to incorporate
Nana Visitor's real-life pregnancy with the DS9 storyline. Minor
characters like Jake Sisko or Quark's brother Rom are also given their fair
share of character advancement, which benefits the series as a whole.
All in all, the storytelling in
Season 5 is extremely solid, continuing DS9's great track record over
the past several seasons. The larger story arcs involving the Dominion, the
Klingon Empire, Cardassia, and Bajor are compelling, and the individual stories
that are told in each episode are very well done. Episodes like "The
Assignment," in which Chief O'Brien is blackmailed into becoming a saboteur,
show off the way that DS9 can do a great job at telling intriguing,
engaging stories week in and week out.
The DVD
The seven-DVD set is packaged
in the same style as previous seasons, in an attractive "book" with
each disc on a separate page. It's all made of a sturdy, flexible plastic that
looks like it will stand up to wear and tear very well, while taking up a very
modest amount of shelf space.
Video
Deep Space Nine: Season 5
continues to look very good overall in its DVD transfer, though I didn't find
this season to look quite as stunning as Season 4. The image overall tends to
be a little softer than I expected, and very occasionally I spotted a digital
artifact. However, these are minor issues that aren't even going to be noticed
by the majority of viewers; as a whole, the series looks extremely good. The
image is spotlessly clean and free of noise or print flaws, the CGI looks great
and is seamlessly integrated into the live-action shots, and colors look
vibrant and rich. With the darker mood overall of DS9, we do get more
use of shadow and often a darker color and lighting palette, and the image
handles the contrast very well under these circumstances as well as in more
brightly lit scenes.
Audio
DS9's choice of a
remastered Dolby 5.1 and the original Dolby 2.0 soundtrack will make everyone
happy. While the surround isn't all that aggressive, the 5.1 track has a nice
fullness to it that's pleasing to the ear. Dialogue is always crisp and clear,
and special effects and music are well balanced and clean-sounding. All in all,
it's another very solid audio experience.
Extras
The main special features are
five featurettes; we also get a photo gallery and a preview trailer for Indiana
Jones. The featurettes are reasonably interesting. The episode "Trials
and Tribble-ations" gets two segments devoted to it, "United Two
Legends" and "An Historic Endeavor," for a total of about 32
minutes. An eleven-minute "Crew Dossier" featurette gives us
interviews with Colm Meaney, who portrays Chief O'Brien. On the technical side,
the seven-minute "Inside DS9 with Michael Okuda" is an
interview with the show's scenic art supervisor, while the latest installment
of "Michael Westmore's Aliens" focuses on the makeup design
challenges of Season 5. It's not a whole lot of special material, but it's
reasonably interesting.
DS9 continues with its
user-unfriendly menu design for its special features, which is especially
irritating given that the rest of the menus for the set are great. You can't
see all of the features at once, so if you're looking for a specific featurette
you have to hunt for it with the arrow keys. And then there are the
"hidden files." There are ten of these mini-featurettes, and they'd
be worth watching if you have the patience to play "hunt the pixel"
in the menu screen... but given that they're an exercise in frustration more
than anything else, they detract rather than add to the overall appeal of the
special features.
Final thoughts
Deep Space Nine has done
an excellent job from the beginning of telling interesting, compelling, and
often exciting stories in one of my favorite science fiction universes. DS9:
Season 5 is another great installment in the series, with excellent
individual episodes as well as exciting overall story arcs concerning the wars
with the Klingons and the Dominion. It's not the best season to jump into if
you have never seen any DS9 episodes before, as the story builds on
developments from earlier seasons, but once you've seen those earlier seasons,
you'll definitely want to continue with Season 5. Highly recommended.
Buy: