I just finished “Meridian“, “Defiant“, and “Fascination“.If you take these three episodes, break them over the rock of analysis like some caveman cracking open an egg, you’ll see in the yoke everything Deep Space Nine has been about until this mid-season three point.

This is a show defined by what it wants to be almost as much as what it is. What I most respect about DS9, so far, is it is always pushing itself to be bigger than it was two or three episodes prior. It exudes gusto. By season three, it’s just about gotten a sense of itself, but the journey has been rough.

Deep Space Nine was a bit of a wild beast when released into the Star Trek pantheon. You get the impression that—prior to filming the pilot—the show’s producers and writers were sitting around on-fire to take a different tract, not just on Trek but its approach to storytelling. It became obvious to me during the first season that no one, not even the show’s writers, seemed to know quite what they wanted to do with it after it debuted. The results (in said first season) are like someone decided to chuck some cage-kept animal into the wild, and just see what it tore into first.
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