Though I’ve been a Trekkie since childhood, I had never seen all of Deep Space Nine until recently. The reason is simple: the series premiered in January 1993 and was midway through its third season when my first husband left me without warning. My life was thrown into turmoil and it took two years for me to get it straight again, during which time money was much too tight for the relative extravagance of cable TV. So though I saw all of the first two seasons, half of the third, and occasional episodes (at friends’ houses or via borrowed videocassettes) of the fourth and fifth seasons, I got rather lost due to the complex story arcs and decided not to see any more individual episodes until I could rewatch the whole show from the beginning. I gave Grace the complete series on DVD for Christmas about a decade ago, but still never got around to viewing it until this year, after I moved to Sunset as my primary residence. As I watched, I soon found that I agree with many reviewers’ opinion that the series is the best of all the Star Trek sequel series; though it was a direct spinoff of The Next Generation I find it very much superior to its parent, not only because of its greater consistency, better writing, and relief from the pressure of being THE Star Trek show of its decade, but also because it discarded the moral oversimplification which (unfortunately) permeates most of The Next Generation in favor of a universe full of greys in which few characters were either moral paragons or cardboard villains.
This realistic portrayal of the ethical tangle that is real life was on full display in a 6th-season episode we watched a couple of weeks ago, “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night“. In it, Major Kira Nerys discovers that her mother, whom she believed to have died in a concentration camp during her planet’s half-century-long occupation by the militaristic Cardassians, actually survived for seven years after the very young Nerys had last seen her…as a “comfort woman” claimed by the Cardassian governor, Gul Dukat. At first, Kira (who started the series as a morally rigid, almost puritanical character, and only slowly grew to accept that real life rarely resembles such abstractions) refuses to believe that her sainted mother could have been guilty of collaboration horizontale, then as she explores the truth (with the help of a mysterious alien device which grants her visions of the past), she instead becomes terribly angry with her mother for literally sleeping with the enemy. But as the vision goes on, she realizes that her mother’s position as the governor’s mistress not only resulted in better living conditions for herself, but also for her husband and children, who might otherwise have died in a labor camp. By the end of the episode she has not forgiven her mother, but has come to accept that she did what she thought best for her family, just as Nerys herself had to make hard choices (including becoming a terrorist) in her own struggle to survive the occupation.
The episode is not a highly rated one; perhaps the topic is too uncomfortable for many viewers, especially in these neo-Victorian times. But as a sex worker and hard-nosed pragmatist, I deeply appreciated the show’s willingness to recognize that sex work, even under duress, can almost never be fit into a pat narrative of villain and victim, and its repeated depiction (in this episode and many others) of war as a filthy business from which nobody emerges entirely clean.
I’ve been slowly watching through star treks, I’ve watched all through Enterprise (which I enjoyed – though watching it over months not years it felt like T’Pau was subjected to so much sexual assault allegory, which soured me to the series), then Voyager (So widely mixed, has some excellent episodes and lot of filler. And as soon as the word Evolution is mentioned you know it’s going to be a stupid episode) and now DS9 (with breaks to watch Discovery when that drops). DS9 seems by far the most consistently good. I remember that episode (though I’m currently only near the end of S3 on my re-watch) and recall it being powerful even though I was just a (older) teen when I watched it.
The whole Dominon War plot evolution, through the last 2 seasons, made DS9 more thought provoking than I thought possible when I started the series. Many characters in that evolution, and subplots, enriched.the entire experience, IMO. And, of course, the battle scenes, both in space and on the ground, spiced things up considerably. Enjoy!
Overall it’s a good episode, but the reason it doesn’t rank higher among my favorites is that it feels a bit too much like ret-conning. Six (or more) years of Dukat needling Kira about any number of things and THIS is the first time that her mother has come up? Not buying it.
That’s a purely in-universe reason which has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter, but I do think it impacts the overall reception of the episode.
https://youtu.be/WXDA8cRQYeA
This is the best DS9 episode. Very Shakespearean. Sisko wrestles with his conscience, about bringing the Romulans into the War, under false pretenses. Very pragmatic, yet the pain of the decision shows that sometimes, you just have to make the tough call, while being very aware of The Law Of Unintended Consequences. Enjoy!
Oh no question – I’ve probably watched In the Pale Moonlight at least a dozen times and it’s still highly enjoyable!
Truly great episode.
Progress travels in a Hurst. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was hated in its time.
No question “In the Pale Moonlight” will survive the Lindy Effect.
Typo: “In the Pale Moonlight” should have read “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”
Agreed, DS9 is the best one. As to morally ambiguous, the moment I noticed something was really different is when Cisco commits some really bad war-crimes and not because there was no other choice.