I sampled a few episodes of Deep Space Nine and (couldn’t resist) a few episodes of Discovery season 2 (skipping season 1).
I ended up comparing four different DS9 viewing guides and including in my own list pretty much anything that any of the lists recommended. I ended up with 129 out of 173 episodes so I’m not sure I’ll finish the show but I like it so far. The AI upscale version I found looks very nice and I’ll bet we’re going to start seeing official AI upscales of shows in the near future. (Though, as with computer prices, you can always wait a few months and get something better that’s faster and cheaper.)
Discovery has some flaws for sure but I like it more than I expected to from reading all the criticisms. Maybe it helps that I already knew about some of the flaws going in, since even those things (at least from what I’ve seen so far) are not as pronounced as I’d been led to believe. (Well, except for the thing where in an urgent situation the characters pause to have an unhurried conversation.) I can already tell the overarching story is going to be unsatisfying whatever the red angel ends up being but the moment-to-moment stuff is compelling enough.
One thing that connects the two shows in my mind is that each has a sort of comedy relief character who can be annoying at times. In DS9 it’s the doctor and in Discovery it’s the cadet from Baskets.
in general I don’t particularly like watching AI upscales other than of particularly high quality scans of old animated stuff that’ll never get a better transfer, but I have to admit that DS9 has managed to establish itself as like, canonically AI-upscaled at this point, because a) the fans are determined to do it and b) the original source material is so soft-focus that it doesn’t look particularly bad – it’s nowhere close to native 4K, of course, but it can actually be less distracting rather than more to watch it that way, which is novel.
I’m legit curious what episodes they said to skip because that’s a lot of episodes and way, way, way too many modern guides say to skip stand alone stuff because modern TV’s assumption is good writing is ‘it’s serialized’.
But like, I’m also a very big advocate for experiencing the totality of a work because you never know what parts of something huge are actually going to resonate with you. And DS9 has far and away the highest hit rate for any star trek show, period.
Yes, even in the few episodes I have seen so far there was already one marked mediocre in one of the guides and not recommended in the others, and I liked it.
This is one of the guides I referred to, if you’re curious (not the only one, but the most attractive one):
The first guide I came across was intended for someone who just wants to follow the main storyline. That’s not my intention, so I largely ignored that one.
move along home is some good ass first season star trek character building! in fact i think all my favorite star trek is early-in-the-show ice breaking leadership conference exercises disguised as episodes
I will say that this list is filled with ‘okay’ episodes that are literally some of the best episodes of the series and all of star trek, like Past Tense.
Honestly one of my hottest DS9 takes is the dominion war episodes are good to great but the individual character building episodes are almost all the best ones. The dominion war being in the background makes a lot of those better though.
I really like the idea of section 31 being a thing that never actually existed before DS9 and sloan was just lying. It’s really too bad they were clearly set up as inevitable big bads in the next Alpha Quadrant show that never actually happened
One of the greatest strengths of TNG was always the fact that nearly everyone on the ship had trouble connecting in one way or another, and that they learned how to navigate those difficulties together by all letting each other be their oddball selves. They don’t need fixing or magical nuclear families to be okay, just people whose weirdness jives with their own. That’s ninety percent of what makes Starfleet go in the first place, when you get right down to it. That’s… the point of the poker game, y’all. That’s the entire metaphor.
