A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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,
The Undiscovered Country
and
First Contact
. The first three had Nicholas Meyer in common (as either writer or director), while
First Contact
went down the populist action movie route with the Borg as dynamic and destructive villains. They all brought characterisation to the fore and featured ideas mixed with action, sticking faithfully to Gene Roddenberry’s initial prescription for
Star Trek
. It was to be a lesson learned by J. J. Abrams when the time came to reinvent
Star Trek
once again for a twenty-first-century mainstream movie audience.

Chapter 9

New Ground:
Deep Space Nine

‘
Roddenberry created characters that he purposely chose not to put in conflict. There’s no good drama without conflict
.’ Rick Berman

    The creators of
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
, the second TV spinoff from
The Original Series
, deliberately conceived the show as the ‘anti-
Star Trek
’. David Carson, who directed the two-hour pilot episode, said of the show’s creators: ‘I think what they’re striving for is to look at the people in the 24th century who are not so much at peace with themselves as the crew of the
Enterprise
was in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.’
Deep Space Nine
would diverge considerably from what Michael Piller called ‘Roddenberry’s box’ of restrictive storytelling rules and would take
Star Trek
in a new direction. The new storytellers who would map this unexplored territory included Ira Steven Behr and Ron Moore.
    The show debuted in 1993, during the sixth season of
The Next Generation
, and it was more a spin-off from that show than from the original
Star Trek
. Set in the same twenty-fourth-century time period, it featured many of the same characters, including Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) and, from the fourth season onwards, Klingon Worf (Michael Dorn). The show would match its progenitor for longevity, running for seven seasons to 1999, but would not make the step up to feature films like the previous two series.
    From the beginning,
Deep Space Nine
was intended to be different. Executive producers Rick Berman and Michael Piller signalled this difference in the most dramatic way pos -sible – the show would not feature a Federation starship engaged in exploration. Instead, the title referred to an isolated space station to which the drama of each episode would come. Fan jokes at the time had the station (and potentially the series) boldly going nowhere.
    Controversy dogged this ‘darker’
Star Trek
series from the outset, with J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the similarly space-station-set
Babylon 5
(which began airing mere weeks after
Deep Space Nine
), heavily suggesting that the development of Paramount’s new
Star Trek
show had been influenced by his proposal. Straczynski had attempted to sell his space station series to Paramount as early as 1989, complete with series bible, pilot script and outlines for a first season of twenty-two episodes, including development artwork and character histories. Paramount rejected this detailed proposal, but only announced
Deep Space Nine
after Warner Bros. TV picked up Straczynski’s
Babylon 5
. For his part, Straczynski remained convinced that
Babylon 5
must have influenced the development of
Deep Space Nine
, something that all involved have long denied. Straczynski decided to rise above the controversy, knowing that suing Paramount would probably not help his own career. ‘[Paramount] know what happened, and I know what happened’, Straczynski posted to his internet forum in 1996. ‘The fact that the two shows were so similar at that time – one a nobody show from nowhere, the other bundled with the
Star Trek
name – came within an inch of killing
Babylon 5
. We were told “The syndie [syndication] market can’t sustain two shows like this; you’re gonna get creamed.”’
    In fact,
Babylon 5
went on to secure a five-season run (although as with the original
Star Trek
, renewal was always tricky, complicated by the fact that Straczynski had set out to tell a complete five-year story). The series even spawned its own
Star Trek
-style spin-offs in the form of a series of TV moviesand
Crusade
, a one-season follow-on.
Babylon 5
deliberately set out to challenge the
Star Trek
storytelling style, to overcome the end-of-episode narrative reset button that reasserted the status quo, and to present storylines and characters that were con -stantly changed by the narrative developments of the series. It was a storytelling