Star Trek: 10 Reasons Deep Space Nine Was Cruelly Misjudged

7. No Starship ... At First

If you're going to boldly go where no one has gone before, you might as well do it in a totally bitchin' spaceship. There's nothing more iconic to Star Trek fans than the sight of the Enterprise whooshing past the camera. For nearly fifty years, Trekkies of all ages have dreamed of being aboard a starship, doing all that boldly going stuff. I doubt those same fans dreamed of living aboard a strange alien space station, surrounded by squabbling aliens, religious zealots, and the criminal underworld, with the possible invasion of an alien armada full of xenophobic, shape-shifting bastards constantly looming in the background. Star Trek taps into a fundamental truth of human history. Almost every advanced civilization has created a new form of transportation to traverse a previously impossible distance, to see new wonders, to meet new civilizations ... and to immediately stick our big fat noses all up in their business. Let's be honest, Star Trek is a very American show. The Original Series is founded on the 1960's ideology that it's America's responsibility to be most advanced, enlightened society going and to make sure everyone else out there enlightens the hell up. Again, that may sound like a knock, but it isn't. Star Trek embraces humanist, progressive values. For all its allegorical stories, it has rarely come down on the wrong side of history. If you want to look for it, though, you can easily see Star Trek as a reflection of the human desire for convenience (the transporter, the replicator) and the "quick fix" (the easily solved moral quandaries). The Enterprise pops up in a new place and finds a new race of people who need saving. In short order, the Enterprise finds a foolproof solution to the society's problem, learns an important lesson, and flies away while the alien society is left to pick up the pieces. That can lead to safe, disposable stories. Deep Space Nine is about making hard decisions and living with the consequences. That only happened because Sisko and company stayed in one place. Audiences looking for some escape found this notion too real or too depressing. Sure, the Defiant showed up in Season 3, but it was never away from home for long. And home wasn't always an inviting place.