I’m watching S7E20 right now and the entire scene before the Defiant undocked from DS9 had that cinematic vibe you only get from a bonafide Hollywood movie.
Tng already started, they had more popular actors and generally were a larger commercial success.
Honestly: cardassians were a major part of ds9 and we’re publicly unpopular because they were such complex characters, and the dominion weren’t much better.
Tng has an excellent rogues gallery, they invented most of those races, and data was, at the time, the most popular character in trek, potentially outshining spock himself.
Ds9 wasn’t flashy or digestible in comparison, it was more cerebral than even tng, even their wars were complex.
Finally, ds9 was a second tier syndication, it got worse airing times and worse networks than tng, especially as UPN started pumping voy and tng was on… Either scifi (before syfy) or USA.
And people were starting to tire of trek near the end, especially with voy.
Also Avery Brooks wasn’t interested in playing Susko anymore. Nana Visitor wanted to raise her kid. Tensions between her and Alexander Siddig father of the kid. So casting would be a problem.
DS9 being a more story arc focused show that had wrapped up it’s stories didn’t help either.
That whole thing between siddig and visitor was crazy, amazed they fit that into the plot as well as they did.
Siddig is fun to watch, but he also seems really skeezy given all that.
Yeah when Kira is carrying Keiko’s baby and says “You did this to me!” to Dr Bashir it’s true for the characters and the actors. I’m sure that was intentional.
DS9 pulled off a political space drama that could rival Dallas or MASH and they got 7 seasons. I’m rewatching it again and I still can’t believe that prime time viewers would sit through these episodes that are just 2 people arguing the nuances of humanity for 45 minutes. It’s nothing like TV is today.
As far as a movie, I think the TNG movies weren’t that Trek. They often took the characters in strange directions, favored more digestible plotlines, and wrote dialogue that you’d expect from AI. I value the television wellspring of Trek in the 90s/early 2000s. It is so cool, and that era is still bearing fruit today.
I would like to see more of the DS9 characters, and like to see what a movie budget would do, but I don’t trust that a DS9 movie would’ve been given the reverence needed to make it right. It has been great to see Picard and the ST world in the later years, but I don’t know if it makes the lore any better. I’m not sure that we are any closer to another golden decade of ST.
Thanks for posting this and helping me get some of my thoughts on DS9 coalesced. Do you have a DS9 movie plot you think would’ve worked? Those ‘golden years’ of Trek were also open to the most fan input, with concepts and entire scripts being submitted. If we had 26 episode seasons to play with, maybe they’d take our call.
Remember that Deep Space Nine and Voyager were regarded as “spin-off” series at the time. It would have been harder to justify a theatrical outing for either of them because they weren’t the “main” Star Trek or had the Enterprise like The Next Generation.
And the TNG movies were still being made after both of those series went off the air. It would have been nice if they could have rolled Deep Space Nine or Voyager into one of those movies (some early leaks from back in the day suggested they tried to do that).
I think there are a couple of reasons. STIX and STX were failures, one so bad it ended the franchise. Also, IIRC Avery Brooks wasn’t happy about the Sisko ending and he has pretty much stayed out of the limelight since DS9. While it was on the air the viewing figures weren’t extraordinary. Worf was thrown in to get more TNG fans interested in the same way Jeri Ryan was put in a catsuit on VOY. DS9’s last two seasons were binge TV before we knew that existed, it was ahead of its time, which explains why it’s a sleeper hit and fan favorite. But not a great financial success at the time.
Agreed… maybe because the series ended with such finality?
Just make a movie about whatever the hell Sisko has been doing.
Also, it was because ds9 was a sleeper and everybody loved tng. Voyager also got the shaft in that. And I don’t blame tng at all, but ds9 and voy should have gotten their time in the movie limelight. If anything, ds9 has the MOST potential for a comeback/reboot compared to the other two… Tng was “Picard, the era”, voyager was “we’re lost and will fix the borg problem kindve”, but ds9 has too many problems and lose ends. Too many characters and what ifs. Maybe it’s better that way though. Like when something as a cliffhanger stays awesome if you never touch it again, and as soon as you do, it erodes the original’s legendary, untouchable status in your mind. Like maybe berserk should’ve just ended, maybe ff7 shouldn’t have been remade, maybe Shrek should’ve ended at 1, and maybe star wars should’ve stopped at rouge one.
yea it had a whole arc which ended as it should. from beginning to end. TNG, enterprise was more episodic arcs than a whole series arc. nutrek for how bad they were, could not replicate DS9 series arcs.
i think any new trek series going foward, not showrunners lik kurtzman, should focus on other quadrants.
I’d like to see some 2nd contact with a few Delta quadrant groups. Have the Vidiians gotten over the phage? Did the remaining Varro find refuge or give anyone else an STI? I need answers.
I need a happy ending for the Silver Blood 😭
i think the phage was already cured, in the think tank episode, they said they found a cure for them. but it was off-screen of course. Also exploring gamma quadrant? and the rest of delta quadrant.
Good memory.
SEVEN: An artificial intelligence.
KURROS: The mind of mathematician and the soul of an artist. I’m afraid he’d much rather be modelling a fractal sculpture than analysing the data of our latest astronomical scan. And now you have met us all. A small group of minds, but we have helped hundreds of clients. We turned the tide in the war between the Bara Plenum and the Motali Empire. Re-ignited the red giants of the Zai Cluster. Just recently, we found a cure for the Vidiian phage.
JANEWAY: The Vidiians?
KURROS: You would hardly recognise them now. Just last month we helped retrieve a Lyridian child’s runaway pet. A subspace mesomorph, I might add. We had to invent a whole new scanning technology just to find it.
JANEWAY: And what did you ask for as compensation?
KURROS: One of their transgalactic star charts. The best map of the known galaxy ever created.
Feels a bit cheap, considering how much time was spent with them earlier in the show.
At any rate, there’s always more to be explored.
I actually liked it. It’s kind of like beating up Worf. They used a former enemy whose power we are aware of, and showed how trivial they are before Art Vandaley
There were still talks of a proper film, but it never came together.
I would’ve loved to have seen it. I’ll bet the killed off characters hampered the options
Would really deflate the drama of doing so, only to bring them right back…
I would watch “A quadrant of their own”
people were absolutely sick of star trek, after more than a full decade of back to back trek series and a run of average to terrible films
I’ll disagree with you there. People aren’t sick of trek; maybe they’re sick of Hollywood bullshit trying to tell us what we think we should like. But trek is trans dimensional. Even my 10 year old gets it, and he’s usually buried in his iPad when I watch star trek.
