We just saw DS9, and give it an A-.  More action in te first five minutes
thatn in ST:TNG the last three years.

123 responses total.

When is the first episode going to be on locally (ie Channel 50)
does anyone know ?

Sunday the 10th at 3 pm.  It will then take over the time slots from TNG,
(Saturdays at 6pm and repeated Sundays at noon).  TNG will move to 5pm
Sundays with repeats at 3pm the following Saturday, all this starting on
January 17th.  This info is from last Sunday's Freep (1/3).

bap, what station did you see it on?

Toledo's channel 36 showed it last night, as did all civilized
coties in this country.  I'll be seeing a tape of it Wednesday -
I look forward to it!

Liked the action.  Title sequence is a little long and boring.  Theme music
isn't very dynamic, hints at the old theme, yet doesn't seem dark enough
to be ominous - it's just kinda flat, imho.  (hey, I had to pick *something*
to complain about!)  I think the show has a big head start in developing
things - the characters, the universe in the 24th century, that sort of
thing, because that was all flushed out in STTNG.  Watching the old STTNG
reruns on 50 and 36 (not every night, mind you, I'm not THAT much of a
trekker) but anyway, watching those reruns...  some of the episodes seem
rather silly/primitive now - either see-through plots, lame lines, and
all those other things you end up with undeveloped characters.  In short,
I think the quality of STTNG shows have gone up over the years, and I think
DS9 can pick up that quality basically where STTNG is now.

Now that DS9 hs been seen around here, what did people think ?

had to borrow a friend's tv to see DS9.
enjoyed it.  cool!

  OK for an expository episode, but the whole pseudo-mystical plotline
is really cheesy..  I had no idea the shapeshifter was going to be played
by "Clayton" from Benson..

     The DS9 theme reminds me more of a Western than Star Trekl of either
variety, but I don't mind.
     The cheesy spiritual stuff was just a plot device to develop Sisco's
past and explain why he was where he was.  I don't think we'll need to see
it anymore.
     The second episode was even better then than the pilot.  They managed
to make the conflict more complex then the good guy vs bad guys conflicts
in ST or in STTNG.  Whoever commented that DS9 benefits from the
development work done in STTNG is right.

i'd disagree that the original _st_ was simplistic in the good guy/
bad guy mould or that they're outdoing it there or in character 
development. lengthier comments to follow.

I liked it, although the character development for everyone except Sisko
was a little forced. I do know there are a lot of people out there who
give you their life story the first time you talk to them, but did they
all have to be assigned to one space station?

     I think that'll get better as the weeks go by and each character gets
an episode to develop themselves in.  I'd guess that's what they're going
to do.

That's what it's beginning to look like.  This last episode focused
somewhat on Kiras past and the next sho wlooks like it will be
looking primarily at Odo.
So far I think the show is developing  well.

<insert longer comments here>

i think the series sits between the original (below) and tng (above) in
its early attempts to define character. one of the problems that limited
development in this second episode was developing character with refer-
ence to events, not simply with reference to character. characters on ds9,
as on tng, are often reacting "in character" to plot, not developing inde-
pendently. ds9 is going a bit in the right direction by letting the central
character develop himself and paying attention to more peripheral characters,
but again, only so far.

i think it's a myth, for instance, that the acting on tng is better than on
the original...okay, it's true that patrick stewart is a better actor than
william shatner, but even so and despite that, who got the wider range to
play? shatner. as to the other cast members, take it by position: jonathan
frakes is no leonard nimoy; is gates mcfadden really anywhere near as good
as deforest kelley was? is levar burton even half as interesting as james
doohan was, and has his character developed very much? etc. the point of
this digression is, in the old series, character was developed in glances,
asides, interpersonal dialogues and other personal interactions that were
pretty much extraneous to the major movement in the plot. sulu's interest 
in botany and uhura's in singing, for instance, had almost nothing to do 
with the plot resolutions of the episodes in which they appeared. 

on tng, there has, comparatively, been very little development of that. for 
ds9 the first episode was very good because it shaded several 
personalities, notably sisko's, around very personal, very human 
experiences. the problem with the second episode was that everybody's 
character was being brought out in reaction to the threat of terrorism--and 
the personal qualities at stake, notably social loyalties, were less 
interesting than those of the first (love, personal loss, personal demons) 
and predictably played. the third episode is similar in that although odo 
was the center of attention, the viewer probably doesn't feel closer to him 
as a person. more was done in this episode for jake and kono in that regard 
than for odo. i'd make the same comment for quark, but i think they cut him 
a bit short--his reaction was simply one that played against the stereotype 
expectations, and it didn't go a lot farther.

so, in short, ds9 needs to show the interior lives and interests of its
wide cast, not their half-professional, half-personal reactions to crises.
otherwise, i think it might ultimately go no farther than tng.

  I'm amused that you find the acting in the original series to be 
better than in the new generation..  

i dunno why you're amused. has jonathan frakes ever done much more than
raised his voice? etc. there's really not much variation for the majority
of the cast. the best parts in tng are picard, data, whorf, and barkley
(played by dwight schultz, who _is_ a terrific actor). the rest of the 
time, most of the cast is expressionless paste who act their characters'
_professions_, not their characters. good acting begins and ends in char-
acter, and six seasons of tng still hasn't developed the cast as well as
the first season alone on the old series did with its cast.

  Although my experience with the older series has been limited 
(I'm simply not a big fan of science fiction films or television)
I've never been impressed with the quality of the acting nor have
I ever really noticed any characterization beyond the sort that
you criticize TNG for..  I would suspect that which you find 
better acted would hinge on which you saw first (or are most
familiar with..)

Gimme a break, keats. You'd prefer the original series if the ST:TNG
cast consisted of Patrick Stewart, Kenneth Branagh, Anthony Hopkins,
Emma Thompson, Roger Reece, and Jeremy Brett.

(Jeremy Brett as Data, doing Holmes on the holodeck?   Hmmmm...)

Life imitates art. I think.

re #16: in effect you're telling me you're criticizing something
you haven't seen.

okay...let's have a quick look at the first season of the original
series in terms of character development...

september 8, 1966: _the man trap_. although this was the "science
fiction-action" episode nbc had demanded because the first two pilots
were "too cerebral," the episode takes the opportunity to develop the
personality of a character not in either pilot: dr. mccoy. we learn
a lot about his soft, romantic side through a couple of dialogues
with kirk. in the first scene aboard the _enterprise_, we also see
uhura try to flirt with spock and explain why she's bored with her
job. later, uhura speaks swahili with the montster disguised as a
crewman. we also learn sulu likes botany, which has a fairly minimal
relation to the plot.

sep 15: _charlie x_: the episode puts kirk's young, female yeoman at
the center of the action and we learn a lot about her and how pro-
fessional women handle sexual aggression. kirk's character is filled
out, too, in having to be a father figure to the young castaway charlie.
uhura sings, kirk and spock play chess (all the while revealing their
different personalities), and kirk takes charlie to the recreation 
deck where we see how else kirk spends some of his rec time.

sep 22: _where no man has gone before_: the second pilot episode
originally, which introduced captain kirk. the episode exploits the
friendship of mitchell and kirk to fill out kirk's personality, a
bit of his background, and his conflict between personal/professional
obligations.

sep 29: _the naked time_: the premise of this episode is that a disease
reveals the secret characters of all the crew by stripping away their
inhibitions; of course the point is to reveal more about all the charac-
ters. _tng_ copied this episode, poorly, in its second episode, but the
first is a classic. pretty much every character, major and minor, gets
a scene and/or a soliloquy to bring out important character traits:
tormolen, the young crew member who dies; sulu, keven o'reilly, spock,
nurse chapel, and of course kirk himself. kirk is revealed to be a young
hornblower; spock to have had deep emotional conflicts over his mixed
heritage; the regular problem of chapel's unreturned love of spock begins
with this episode; sulu is revealed as a swordsman and a wannabe swash-
buckler; reilly an old-fashioned irishman.

october 6: _the enemy within_: a reprise examination, obviously, of
kirk, as he's split physically into his good and bad halves. spock also
discusses his own split nature, and the mccoy-spock conflict of humanity
vs. duty and logic begins here with one of their earliest debates. we
again see yeoman rand who has several important scenes allegorizing how
women deal with sexual harassment on the job. her character continues to
speak for the experience of young women emerging as professionals as well
as just for her character. sulu also gets a good small role as he and
the landing party brave well below-zero temperatures while trapped below
on the planet surface.


...i know this is getting long, and we can't really do even just the first
season. i haven't hit everything even from these episodes, either. it's 
impossible to describe how some of these characters are given just a few
key lines from episode to episode to develop them as people rather than
crew members at the center of the action, which is more _tng's_ style.
because the old series didn't mind arguments between central characters,
there were relationships and complexities in it that _tng_ has never
approached. spock, for instance, has a very interesting and subtle play
from episode to episode on his submerged human side during the first
season. he uses his humanity quite freely while he watches or analyzes
the rest of the crew, and almost but never steps over the line that
defines him as a vulcan quite a few times.

in short, we almost always see that whatever the "science fiction" problem
is, it also requires a resolution in human and personal terms, too. another
basic difference is that _tng_ started with a large ensemble cast where
six or eight characters were considered central "regulars" and were bumping
elbows for character attention. too little time for too many characters and
too much plot meant little character development. on the other hand, on the
old series the core characters were primarily kirk, spock, and mccoy. other
regulars and guest characters rotated in for a few consecutive episodes, in
which they would be central, to get extensive development for that period:
sulu, uhura, nurse chapel, scotty, etc. those characters and their personal
lives would be central to any given plot, and although the main characters
would continue to see development, the first season was a wonderful run at
filling out the characters on the edges, too, by making them central for
an episode or three.

okay, 'nuff for now. sorry for the length.

     I thought the debatew here was about acting.  Let's not confuse
acting and character development.  The play Hamlet develops the character
of Hamlet to an extreme.  We know about every contradictory urge that
troubles this silly Dane.  This is a completely separate question from the
way the role is acted.  It is in the writing.
     Obvfiously, the two are connected, in that a great performance can
bring a poor script to respectability, and a lack-luster performancecan
spoil brilliant writing.  Avery Brooks and Patrick Stuart both leave
William Shatner sadly behind in the acting department imho.  The question
about Kirk's character development vis a vis Picard's or Sisko's is (or
should be) more separated.

  I find myself completely in agreement with Chris's response..

please see #15 for the relevance of the digression. regarding stewart
and brooks and shatner: yup, i think both of the first two are more
accomplished actors than shatner, but i don't think shatner did badly
on _st_, either--he was exactly right for the part even if he's not an
actor of their quality. his acting was quite sufficient. he also carried
off a more complete characterization of a star fleet captain in the 
sense that he was more employed over a wider range. chiefly here i'm
thinking of the better comic parts available to him than stewart has
had, and of the fact that shatner could play action scenes. one criti-
cism of _tng_ has been too little action, and in a way, that's true.
when kirk was in danger, we could expect a good action scene. when 
picard is in danger, we can usually expect him to put down his tea.

nonetheless, conceding shatner, which i think is right, look again
at the rest of _tng_. there's hardly any sustantive acting going on.
_tng_ is a series devoted often to drama, but not to character per
se. i don't _know_ for a fact that jonathan frakes isn't half the
actor leonard nimoy is, but given the way riker has been played, by
frakes and in the series, that's about a correct statement. what
have there been...one or two episodes when dr. crusher's character
was involved, when she really had to act instead of droning out
medical techno-babble? she's nowhere _near_ what deforest kelly
was. the point is, character is so sedated in general on _tng_ that
while the acting is competent, it's hardly as good as the acting on
the old series. beyond stewart/picard, who gets a lot of play, there
isn't much acting demanded. the series has been running about twice
as long now as the old one did, but most of the crew is still 
cardboard cut-out...and the acting reflects that--it has to reflect
that: how emotionally can levar burton say, "you should have that
power now, captain"?

   ...Brent Spinner doesn't do any sustantive acting?  While I will
agree about Frakes, I think Spinner has done an incredible job as
Data.  Now, there probably is more to playing a nonhuman to begin
with, but that character has gotten a lot of attention from friends
of mine who aren't otherwise SF oriented.  Picard, Worf and perhaps
O'Brien have done enough character development to warrant being
considered some of the best TV SF characters displayed, as well.

   I think its too early to really tell about DS9.  Quark is the
first Ferengi I've ever seen that I could stand watching; Odo seems
interesting (missed the show that dealt with him), and the others
seem at last potentially interesting.

In discussing Brent Spinner's contribution to ST;TNG let's not forget
the challenge he faces in playing not one but three characters all with
very similar appearances.  I saw him as the young Dr. Sung the other night 
and was really wowed at his technical skill.

i think i mentioned both data and worf above as the other two good
parts on _tng_. 'course, the producers and writers have this irritating
problem of having _major, major_ parts of worf's life get settled in
two hours maximum, so sometimes his life story is forced. "civil war
on klingon? give 'em two hours." "worf's wife? one episode." "worf's
father? give him a little under an hour over two parts." etc. 

the other problem with data and worf being the two other good parts
is that what's conspicuously lacking in _tng_ is consistently good
_human_ (humanoid, if you prefer) interchange. worf is very different,
and data's inhuman. none of the humans are having any fun these days.

     Hmmmmm, this seems to be the TNG topic now.  <g>  Anyway, my initial
pleasure about Deep 69 is waning somewhat.  I'm beginning to wonder if
they wrote Dax (however you spell that) out of the episode that was
supposed to feature her was because whats-her-name can't act?  Of the
characters, Odod seems to be the most interesting, again following the
non-human emphasis mentioned above.  I think the technobabble is taking
over both in DS9 and in TNG.  It's almost like the folks who the Star
Fleet Technical Reference Manual have finally gotten to play with their
toys on the air, which is not in and of itself a bad thing, but has gotten
a little out of hand.
     Having said that, I really enjoyed last week's episode, which managed
to avoid the pitfalls, and allowed me to hope that Bashir would get aced. 
Oh well.  <sigh>

Hey, what's wrong with Bashir?  *I* like him.

actuall I think it was Rick Berman who is now the executive producer
who also had a hand in writing the Tech Manunal.

     Oh nothing's wrong with Bashir.  It's just me.  I have an
overwhelming urge to get him on a transporter pad and beam him into space
with the transporter set to maximum dispersion.  

     But seriously, he just gets on my nerves, and I think he'd be
terrible to serve with.

  (Who's Bashir?)

The doctor who's always chasing Dax.

I just heard a advertisement on the radio about the "premier" of DS9.
This will be third time I've seen if that ad is true.  I wish they'd
put something new on; this gets old quickly.

  Ahh..  I guess I fall into the "hope he gets eaten by some sort of
energy creature" camp -- he really annoys me..

i don't think he did a very good job of acting out his alter-ego
during the possession episode. his acting seemed very forced and
trite, which surprised me because he does a very good job as the
doctor.

Sorry if this response is the first since March '93, but I didn't think it
warranted a new thread, since it's sorta DS9-related.  ;-)

Anyway, there have been discussions about how you couldn't use the transporter
on Trills and their host bodies, so they had to go about using shuttlecraft.
But on the last DS9 episode, DAX beams down to a planet with Odo & 2 Bajorans
from a runabout.  What gives?

ooh!  good point.  I think with the ageing of the series, the holes
just keep getting bigger...  I have seen more of the sort, but I can't
seem to think of any right now...

Umm, there was a chemical which allowed the host and symbiont to merge
together and, uh...  Why am I defending loopholes in a Trek series,
anyway?  (Guess who's eagerly awaiting _Babylon_5_.)

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