Back Through the Wormhole, Part VIII: Odds & Ends

Believe it or not, after seven installments there's still stuff left to say about Deep Space Nine. Here are a few topics that didn't grow into full-fledged essays:It's an axiom of television writing that romance, and specifically romantic pursuit, is interesting, but established relationships, and most especially marriages, are boring. Perhaps because it was generally strongest when telling

Back Through the Wormhole, Part VII: The Justice Trick

BENDER: Forget it, you can't tempt me.ROBOT DEVIL: Really? There's nothing you want?BENDER: Hm. I forgot you could tempt me with things I want.Futurama, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings"If Deep Space Nine's character development has a theme, it is the loss of innocence, and of an idealized self-image. The characters who undergo this process most prominently over the course of the series

Back Through the Wormhole, Part VI: Ode to Kira

The breathtaking awesomeness of Kira Nerys, which has been recurring theme in these essays, became apparent to me only a few episodes into my journey back through Deep Space Nine. Almost as soon as I came to this realization, I started pondering a question: how is that this fantastic character, who is strong, capable, confident, and decent, doesn't have pride of place in the pantheon of kickass

Recent Reading Roundup 15

This recent reading roundup is brought to you courtesy of my brand new MacBook Pro and the almost anticlimactic process of setting it up--simply connect the new computer to the old one via a FireWire cable and come back in an hour to find your old computer mounted on a device with double the RAM, triple the disk space, and four times the processor speed. To quote Giles, I felt so useless, just

Back Through the Wormhole, Part V: What Does God Need With a Space Station?

No one who watched Deep Space Nine's pilot episode, "Emissary," would have had any reason to expect a subtle, multi-faceted treatment of religion from the series. Though by no means disrespectful or dismissive of religion, "Emissary" treats it in a manner familiar from many other genre stories--the SFnal trope of alien (or human) gods who turn out to be aliens themselves, the fantasy standard of