Deep Space Nine 2x3 "The Siege"

rating: **

the story: The rogue Bajorans calling themselves the Circle have sieged Deep Space Nine!

what it's all about: The biggest problem with the ambitious three-part episode that opened the second season is that it spent so much time focusing on Kira, it kind of almost totally forgot Sisko.  Now, this is a problem.  A lot of fans think Sisko in the early seasons is pretty weak, and while on the whole this isn't really true, his appearances in material like "The Siege" certainly don't help.

Again, this is a problem, because by this third episode in the arc, it's arguably Sisko's turn at driving the story, and instead it just seems as if he's trying desperately to play catch-up the whole time.  And thus we discover the essential weakness of this arc: the series was by no means ready for it.

As we would see later in the series, whether in "The Search" or "The Way of the Warrior" (which are, essentially, similar stories that opened the third and fourth seasons, respectively), or even the comparatively minor but vastly superior "Civil Defense," getting Sisko right is absolutely imperative in pulling off a story like this.  If you put the station in peril, its commander has to have a commanding presence.  Which just doesn't happen in "Siege" (not to be confused with the seventh season "Siege of AR-558," another episode unfortunately regarded as vastly superior). 

Simply put, if you're going to pull the trigger on a big moment, such as putting the station in peril, you really need to think it all the way through, especially if you try to do it so near the beginning of the series.  This is probably the very episode the producers started to realize the importance of this, because by the end of the season, a truly credible threat (the Dominion) was introduced, and it ended up defining the series far more than Bajoran politics.

Again, this is not to say fans who think Bajoran politics ruined the early seasons are right.  Clearly they could produce great drama, with or without direct Cardassian involvement (although that's another gaping hole in this episode, the absence of Gul Dukat, which even by the two-part "Maquis" later in the season, and the Dukat-heavy third season and beyond, had been identified by those same producers).  But you can't let Bajorans overrun the station.  You just can't.  I don't care how many admirals are telling Sisko they can't do anything about that sort of development. 

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this was exactly the episode that needed to happen, not just to galvanize the storytelling, but to clear the Bajoran problems that were the original basis of the series.  The bottom line, though, is that "Siege" feels like an underwhelming conclusion to what should have been a shining creative moment for the young series.  There's something wrong with that, anyway.

Still, the best moment in the episode, Dax joining Kira in some antiquated fighter unit, helps shine a renewed light on Dax, her lively personality, which would come up again later in the season ("Playing God").  Seeing these two women bond is probably one of the better moments hindsight can give, from an era where that has become increasingly important.  This had never happened before in the history of Star Trek, but soon, in Voyager, it would become a welcome new staple.  So that's the best way, probably, to think of "Siege."

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Not essential to the franchise per say.
• series - Pretty important to the series.
• character - Has good character work from Dax and Kira.
• essential - Not essential.

notable guest-stars:
Frank Langella
Rosalind Chao (Keiko)
Hana Hatae (Molly)
Steven Weber
Louise Fletcher (Winn)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
Aron Eisenberg (Nog)
Philip Anglim (Bareil)

Deep Space Nine 2x2 "The Circle"

rating: ***

the story: Kira is replaced in her position aboard the station, so she decides to go to Bajor and see if there's anything interesting happening there.

what it's all about: This second chapter in the opening trilogy (trilogies were a big thing in Enterprise's final season, but arcs tended to go longer after this initial extended effort) of the season sounds a little flippant in that description above, doesn't it?  That's probably because "The Circle" might be considered filler.  But really, it's just Deep Space Nine testing the waters of serialized storytelling, which it really wouldn't try again (as opposed to heavily-interrelated storytelling, which began in the first season and continued steadily throughout the series) until its final seasons.

What "Circle" has going for it is a further exploration of Bajoran life and politics.  As such, we again meet two crucial Bajorans, Vedek Winn (later to be better known as Kai Winn, a position she parlayed from being analogous to the Catholic pope to being prime minister as well) and Vedek Bareil (Kira's love interest for the first three seasons), as well as enjoy the continued killer uncredited appearances of Frank Langella (that's probably the biggest selling point of this whole trilogy right there) as the main villain, the secret conspiracy leader who's about to play his hand and/or be exposed.  We'd met Winn and Bareil last season ("In the Hands of the Prophets"), and so seeing them again was a sign that this was indeed going to be a series where seeing familiar faces would take far less time than in Treks past, as the whole premise of a station-bound series had always promised but to this point seldom delivered.

Winn ended up becoming a crucial recurring character throughout the series, and so each and every early appearance is important in seeing how she developed into the monster fans best remember her as, a crass opportunist for whom events like this were made.  If you want to view the trilogy, and this second act, as important for any other reason than putting Kira in the spotlight and trying to make the most of Bajoran drama, then this is how to do it.  Her absence from the previous "Homecoming" installment seems odd in hindsight.  Actually, if you like Star Wars and don't mind comparisons from the prequels, watching Winn in these moments is like seeing Palpatine blatantly manipulate everyone before he completes his transformation into the Emperor, hiding in plain sight.

The scenes with the hero from "Homecoming" are almost meaningless by comparison.  I remember the character's name (Li Nalas) perfectly well enough, and apparently the actor, Richard Beymer, was in West Side Story (the creators of this series loved vintage Hollywood, as you'll see later in the season), but he leaves no real impression in the series, which was otherwise gifted with an abundance of memorable characters.  That will always be a drawback of this ambitious early arc-heavy effort.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - This one's pretty series-specific.
• series - See above.
• character - Come to see Kira, stay for Winn.
• essential - It's actually pretty important to where Winn ends up later in the series.

notable guest-stars:
Frank Langella
Louise Fletcher (Winn)
Philip Anglim (Bareil)

Deep Space Nine 2x1 "The Homecoming"

rating: ****

the story: Kira believes the key to reviving Bajor's fortunes is liberating a Resistance hero who has just been discovered alive in a Cardassian labor camp.

what it's all about: A lot of fans found the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine dull because of their heavy quotient of Bajoran stories.  Actors playing Bajorans tended to play them as subdued individuals (a key exception to this rule was Nana Visitor's Kira, who's one of the most spirited characters in all of Star Trek).  The hero Kira liberates in "The Homecoming" conforms to this standard.  Thankfully, there's always Kira and the complexities of Bajoran politics.  It's fascinating that politics became such a favorite subject on TV in the years following Deep Space Nine's conclusion in 1999, whether in The West Wing or House of Cards.  Like a lot of its content, this was one element in which the series was ahead of its time.

Another was its focus on serialized storytelling, of which "The Homecoming" was the first of an unprecedented three-episode arc (the series later had six- and ten-episode-long arcs, but not until its final two seasons).  It's also the best and most focused episode of this first stab at extended storytelling.  It builds on work from the first season, notably "In the Hands of the Prophets," the season finale, which helped set the tone for the rest of the series. 

The story of a forgotten hero is a compelling one, which fans might tend to overlook because the two episodes that follow kind of move on from it to other elements.  In fact, the whole of the arc is very relevant to 2016 U.S. politics, the search for a hero who will unite a dispirited population, amid controversies over outside influence and outsiders within the population itself.  (It's no surprise, then, that scores of Star Trek personalities have been pledging to oppose Donald Trump, who certainly appears to fit the model of the villains in this story.) 

In fact, the xenophobia in the arc is later echoed in Enterprise's "Demons"/"Terra Prime" arc, which many fans consider the true final episodes of that series.  Certainly, fans remember those episodes better.

The problem, again, is that Deep Space Nine became much better known for other stories, or for earlier, more self-contained efforts like "Duet."  Yet it's absolutely worth immersing yourself in the most ambitious look at the problems facing Bajor, the planet Starfleet and Sisko came to help transition from years of Cardassian oppression, as represented in "Homecoming" and its two sequels.  The hero Kira finds actually helps Kira find her own voice, as someone who's far more willing to cooperate with Starfleet than she'd been previously.  That means this episode is best viewed as an essential Kira episode, which in turn helps unlock the entire series for fans still wondering what it's all about.

As a lot of fans have already, you may decide that Deep Space Nine has considerably more merit than you have previously considered.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Star Trek's mission statement is all about discovering the hero in all of us.
• series - The mission statement of this series is all about discovering heroes in unlikely places.
• character - Kira's most certainly a hero, which this episode makes clear.
• essential - As stated above, this is an episode that unlocks a lot of series mythology.

notable guest-stars:
Frank Langella
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
Marc Alaimo (Dukat)
John Fleck