Would Gene consider DS9 "bad Trek"? Most likely, and I agree with your view. His associates claim that he totally despised the premise for the show, like I mentioned a couple of weeks back. He was very protective of his property. If I remember correctly, his opinion was: if he didn't cast it, it wasn't Star Trek.
I can understand that, and can sympathize to some extent. I'm a big fan of Babylon 5, but if someone tried to do a show in the B5 universe without approval of jms, the Roddenberry of B5, I probably wouldn't be interested and I'm *certain* jms would be very unhappy and would not consider it canonical within the B5 universe. For some reason, I never really considered that issue with DS9, and I'm not really sure why.
The popularity of Trek, which had gone on a crescendo between ST2 and ST6, suddenly started to decline among fans. I noticed it on the Internet, and I noticed it talking to fans I used to know at the time. I used to run a Trek fanclub in the early 90's. People just didn't talk about Trek with the same candor or enthusiasm. And I think the ratings or market research by Paramount noticed that there was something going on. That may have well been one of the reasons why Worf was written into DS9, and why the war story arc was introduced.
I wonder if some of that decline in popularity might have something to do with market saturation. I don't think any other story universes had more than one show on at a time back when DS9 first started (now there are several). And DS9 *was* a pretty big departure from previous Trek incarnations, so a lot of people who thought that you can't have Trek without the Enterprise probably felt that Trek was moving away from their interests, so they decided to move away from Trek. Did you see any talk of that in the fanclub? Also, by the time Worf and the Dominion War both got added to the mix, Babylon 5 was up and running full steam, so suddenly Trek wasn't the only space-oriented science fiction choice available on television, so people had something else to get excited about. That might have let some of the air out of the Trek fandom bubble in the early to middle 1990s.
I hate to end up sounding like I'm agreeing with Rodenberry's dictatorial opinions, but to me DS9 wasn't "Star Trek". Trek was about going out there into the unknown, and coming face to face with the wonders of the universe. I like to define DS9 as a really cool scifi show that takes place in the "Star Trek" universe. But it wasn't.. "Star Trek". MHO, of course.
Voyager, at least, takes us "out there". The producers must've realized that this is a value which appeals to Trek fans; otherwise, the next shows coming from the franchise may have taken place in, say, Rigel 7 or the Norpin Colony. Instead, both the Trek products that came after DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, are spaceship-based shows.
I think that, had it not been for the influence of Babylon 5, Paramount would have never done a show based on a space station (see my note below on this also). This leads right back into the question "what is Trek?" If it's a show about going "out there," DS9 still does that in my book, especially once they start exploring the other side of the wormhole on a more regular basis. But is DS9 not true Trek because it doesn't take place on a starship? Did DS9 start becoming true Trek once stories started taking place on the Defiant?
I think to some extent the thing that keeps people coming back to Trek now, the one thing that ties all of the shows together, is that it's now comfortable and familiar. We're all comfortable with transporters and phasers and the universal translator. We all know what the Federation stands for (Section 31 notwithstanding). We understand the Prime Directive (even if it gets ignored on a regular basis), and enjoy watching the Federation "seek out new life and new civizations" (DS9 introduced and/or greatly expanded on some particularly cool civilizations).
That familiarity may be why so many people stuck with Voyager through some really dreadful bouts of writing (and I tend to have a higher opinion than most concerning Voyager, which had some really great stories mixed in the bad). That also may be why people have stayed with Enterprise through it's ups and downs so far. We care about the Federation and we want to know more about it, and so are willing to tolerate weaker stories as long as they are comfortable.
I'm certainly not the first to say this, but maybe the network execs at Paramount know that ST fans like that familiarity, and are therefore unwilling to rock the boat with controversial or cutting edge stories, and maybe *that* is why ST popularity has been declining.
(On an aside, one thing that I found interesting was the color-scheme of the sets designed for the Voyager ship. I always thought of this as a "subliminal" message to Trek fans. These sets, if memory serves, were designed with the assistance of technicians who went all the way back to the TOS. And if you notice, they follow the same color patterns as TOS did. I wonder...)
True, Voyager did start being a lot like "Lost In Space". But, according to legend, "Lost In Space" was inspired by Gene's pitch to CBS, so in a way it came full-circle after all, right? :)
And to turn the circle into a Moebius strip... DS9 might have been inspired by jms' pitch to Paramount as you probably already knew or had read in a previous thread -- or was that earlier in this thread? Or did you in fact post that info? It all blurs together after a while :-)
That "dropping hints" makes for one of my favorite Trek moments. I'll explain: have you noticed how many times we see the viridian on Kirk's shoulder on ST6? It's never in the middle of the frame, but it's *there*. At no point we are told what it is, or what's it supposed to do, until Kirk explains Bones about it. But the director kept "hinting" at something important being there. Replay the movie, and see what I mean.
The example you give from ST6 is a very well done and skillful dropping of hints. What I'm talking about from ST5 is when a someone says something to Kirk that makes everyone in the audience suddenly make a connection or get an insight into what is happening, and then that happens again and again and Kirk *still* doesn't get it. Not situations where we know things he doesn't, but situations where the average person, given all the same info as the character, would have caught on far before the character does. Again, it's been a long time since I've seen ST5, so I don't remember the specifics. (I'm gonna have to rewatch it just to stay in this discussion!)
Reggie Bautista
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