Hello and welcome to Deep Space Nine. We are a space station, not a starship, so you’ll be spending a lot of time with all these delightful side characters like: bisexual fashion lizard. hologram of Frank Sinatra. goblins. goblin comes in 3 varieties: bartender, nephew, and idiot. our doctor is a twink, our commander is antifa and the captain talks to the gods sometimes. our policeman is sometimes a liquid and the science lady is part worm. we have many fine storylines, such as: Goblin Does A Crime, Watch The Irishman Suffer, or The Horrors Of War. As you stroll along our promenade enjoying a raktajino or delicious jumja stick, watch out for our nefarious villains: Pope Karen. clones of Jeffrey Combs. and a horny bastard reptile man who seems convinced this is actually his show. we suspect he may be possessed by demons. Have fun!
If I drove a bulldozer through an apple store and the cops just shoved me in a closet and pumped me full of DMT for 8 hours id literally just do it again the second they let me out
This is like the best admission I’ve ever heard that prison sentences are about fucked up torture rather than keeping dangerous people out of society.
There’s literally an entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode about how effed up this concept is.
As the Sci-Fi writer in question here, do NOT invent the Torment Nexus. Seriously. No.
Sisko after Jadzia tells him she finds Spock really hot and she fucked McCoy a few lifetimes ago: *Sighs heavily* “Sisko to O’Brien, how’s it going with you and Bashir?”
Miles: “Uh… I think fine? Though… we might have a problem. Julian really wants to fuck someone he thinks could be his great-grandmother.”
Sisko, internally: “Why did we bring the horny people on this mission?”
The fact that deep space nine is a shopping mall and gas station is SO charming to me
Not to be extremely American but it’s one of those massive truck stops you find along the interstate that’s always open and has a place to do your laundry and shower and play video poker and buy audiobooks and 30 different kinds of jerky and a new seat cushion for your rig because it’s been bothering you for a while and there are other travelers shooting the shit around the coffee machines just to get some social time in before the road’s calling you back because you aren’t supposed to stay forever. You pick up a hand pie and a fidget spinner and maybe a new pair of sunglasses because god only knows where the your old ones are in the cab, consider buying a carton of cigarettes or that dang horrible nicotine gum and somehow when you roll back through 6 or 8 months later the folks at the inset all-night greasy spoon greet you and everybody else like you’re a regular just there the other day.
Histocially, European colonialization crushed many religions with the expressed aim of replacing them with Christianity in one form or another. Also, non-Christian religions were a major rallying point for resistance to colonialization. So, when a Western TV show or Westerners in general says it’s time to “move past” religion, I can understand people seeing it as a continuation of five hundred years or so of attacks on non-Christian religions.
Of course, there are plenty of other examples of non-Christian inter-religious conflict in history and even in current events, but for people whose countries suffered under European colonialization, it’s not surprising they might see things through that lens primarily.
To bring this back to DS9, the Cardassians certainly suppressed the Bajoran religion during the Occupation, and we’ve seen the Bajoran faith was a meaningful part of the resistance for many, which is why it’s understandable that a lot of Bajorans might get bent out of shape when, say, a Federation teacher tells her students that the Prophets are just super-advanced aliens and that the Celestial Temple is an understandable astrophysical phenomenon. While it’s also understandable that said teacher might insist that teaching the scientific truth is the right thing to do, especially given she’s teaching in a Federation school.
So is the Federation guilty of cultural imperialism? Or are the Bajorans being xenophobic? Or can both be true?
All great fodder for drama.
At least that’s how I saw things when I wrote for DS9.
