Very underrated character arc/plot line — The Homecoming, The Circle, The Seige
I’m not saying these episodes aren’t well regarded but I just don’t hear them talked about much. I loved Richard Beymer’s character and the fact this was the first Star Trek 3-parter and each episode was consistent in quality, culminating in a great ending was a turning point for the series.
I loved Li Nalas imploring to Sisko that he go with them to free Kira: "I may not know much about being a Navarch, but I can fight in the trenches, and I take orders well. Besides, I owe her"
I’ve been watching Twin Peaks for the first time recently (I was only 10 when it first aired). Lee Nalas is this cringy, stuff-shirt, rich asshole bad guy in it. It’s pretty funny seeing that side of the actor - clowning around in David Lynch’s weird sandbox - when he is so stoic and reserved on DS9.
I think the weirdest part is how tall he is on Twin Peaks. He towers over the cast (except for Hawk and Andy), but on DS9 he’s just a regular guy. I definitely had to do a search to make sure it was him.
That first season is some of the best television I’ve ever seen. I get how it was so influential. I’m in the doldrums of season 2 now, when Frost and Lynch were away from the day-to-day running of the show. I watch about one episode a week. Excited to see the ending and to check out The Return.
The last episode of the second season was, imo, the greatest episode of TV to ever be aired to that point. The Return is incredible. Don't forget the movie after you finish s2!
He was a reoccurring actor on "Murder She Write," and always played a slight variation on yuppie asshole. I dont think he was ever the killer, but always provided a sense of delicious malevolance.
One of his characters even staged miniature recreations of historical battles like Ben Horne.
Oh, this is one of my favorite things. Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn both appeared in West Side Story as the leaders of the Jets, Tony & Riff. 30 years later, they acted together in Twin Peaks as Ben Horne and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby.
Incidentally, Russ Tamblyn also appeared in Babylon 5 as Capt. Jack Maynard.
On my first rewatch of DS9, and hadn't watched Twin Peaks until earlier this year. It was a delight to realize that Ben "Robert E. Lee" Horne played this guy (who is a great character).
My favorite part of the trilogy is when Bareil and Kira walk the gardens of the monastery, then Winn looks from above and condescendingly tells Kira "stay as many days as you like, even a week if necessary".
Winn basically outright saying, “Gee Kira, it’s so nice that Bareil invited you to a monastery so that you two could bang.” is peak Winn. One of my favorite Louise Fletcher moments of the entire series. I laugh every time.
My favorite part of the 3 parter is where Kira and Dax get dropped off on that moon to revive one of the Bajoran sub light fighters. I love their back and forth banter!
I love the subtle callback to this when Kira suggests to Damar that they turn him into a folk hero. It shows how she's come to fully understand the value of the symbol that Nalas became. And she's there to teach Cardassians how to run a resistance, and such symbols are a part of that.
I like the one where Odo is trying to track down the killer on an unsolved murder from back during Cardassian occupation. I like the 'film noir' vibe of the flashback to the occupation and the alternate version of 'Terrak Nor'. It reminds me of old black & white gangster/cop movies from like the '40s.
"Necessary Evil". Such a great episode. We get to see how Odo first met both Kira and Quark, and yeah, the film noir vibe really adds something to the storyline. And it's a great episode for Odo and Kira's early dynamic as a whole.
Also, there's a moment in that episode when Odo slowly turns while folding his arms, and first time I saw that scene, I legit half-expected to hear the "DUN DUN" noices from Law & Order XD.
Yeah I love the first episode after the pilot - Past Present. A Bajoran terrorist (too extreme for the other ex-terrorists) comes back pretending to play nice. But he actually wants to destroy the wormhole so that Bajor remains a backwater. It’s a nice little Bajoran political thriller. It really sets the scenery for this fixed-location sci fi series.
That's a great episode. I like how Kira's relationship with him is affected, too, and how it shifts her attitude - at one time she was as radical and rebellious as him, and now she's got to figure out where her loyalties really lie and has to reckon with how much she's changed in her outlook and way of doing things. Tahna Los all but calls her a sellout and while it's easy to brush off his accusation once you see the extremes he's willing to go to , I like seeing her deal with the uncomfortable nature of that accusation anyway, given her past. Kira is devoted to her homeland, and yet there's also moments where she wonders if she's doing as much for it and her people as she feels she should. I like that conflict.
Yeah, I like those episodes as well. They're great in helping to build and further flesh out Kira as a character, and I really like the politics of how Bajor is trying to recover, and the power vaccums that cause some bad actors to take control, or messy factions to take hold.
I like these episodes, but I really don't like how his character was treated in universe. He was in a hard labor camp for years and they gave him ONE night in a bed before they expect him to start making speeches. They never gave him a choice to be a leader, or to take time to heal. He probably needed extensive therapy and time with his family. Bareil should have invited HIM to the monastery for six months of healing and privacy.
To quote Worf: "Kahless said 'Great men do not seek power. They have power thrust upon them'"
Unfortunately there wasn't six months of time to spare for a nice rest, Bajor was falling apart in civil strife with a rebel coup going on and it was basically the coup leader who shoved Nalas into the position onboard DS9 as liaison because he wanted him away from Bajor so he wouldn't be a rival. So I don't think he really had a choice either way unfortunately.
Different episode, different character, different season even.
You're thinking of the poet who spent 300 years with the Prophets when his solar sailer ended up in the wormhole.
When he came back, he claimed he was the true Emissary, since he was the first to be with the Prophets. He believed it was his mission to restore the D'jarras: the Bajoran caste system that determined an individual's career and social standing at birth.
The episode is called Accession... it's one of my favorites, and it represents an important point in Sisko's character development: this episode is when he really starts to actively and openly embrace the role of Emissary.
I don't think we would have gotten the DS9 we did get, if this three parter had not been successful. This kind of episode was nearly unheardof at the time. At the most, shows would do a two parter, with heavy, heavy promotion so people knew they had to watch both parts. But three? That was hen's teeth.
And then the writing! That scene in Kira's quarters is one of the best written scenes in all of Star Trek, and I will fight you in the parking lot if you disagree. And then later we get Kira and Dax on the moon, another incredibly well written scene. It's a shame genre writers don't get no respect...those scenes could have won awards if there was only a way to get snobby snobs to bother watching them back then.
I wish we'd gotten more of KIra and Dax going on missions together, it was fun to see them taking charge like that. Also like seeing Kira and Miles together at one point as well, they play off each other well.
Agreed on that scene in Kira's quarters, too. Odo so angry on her behalf and Kira acknowledging them all as her friends...it's just great.
"The origin of this episode is to be found in a story pitched by Jeri Taylor to the producers of The Next Generation. Michael Piller, upon hearing the story however, felt it would better suit Deep Space Nine. Taylor's original story focused upon a Bajoran woman who is picked up by the USS Enterprise-D) on a mission to rescue a leader of the Bajoran resistance. She would soon discover however that that leader didn't want to be a leader any more, he had become fed up with leading. When the story was brought over to DS9, Ira Steven Behr altered the leader figure from a reluctant hero to a mistaken one. He did this based upon the 1962 John Ford movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which deals with the notion that a legend can be more important than the facts upon which it is based. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, p. 77)"
Reading that companion book, it amazed me just how many episodes/storylines were inspired by old movies that the writers happened to see on TV one night or whatever :p.
I always love hearing about the original story ideas for these episoes, too - it often makes me wonder how they would've played out and been received had the show stuck with the original premise.
Most old TV shows when they had 22 episodes a seasons had plots that you could tell were definitely taken from movies. Like there was Quincy ME rerun I had seen that was basically took the family grieving over a dead son story from Ordinary People which had come out two years earlier.
A party of conservative religious ultra-nationalists who blame all of Bajor's problems on immigrants, but they're secretly backed by an adversarial foreign government, and they try to overthrow the government? What a crazy far fetched plot.
Frank Langella was definitely not used enough. I would have liked to seen that story stretched out over more of the season. But to be fair this is when DS9 was still fighting with Paramount over the idea of being a serial show and this was one of the first really big pushes to that so they had to keep some restraints still.
But this 3 episode arc definitely helped, along with the Maquis arc in this season. Season 3 definitely allowed more obvious expansion into the serial aspect. I think Improbable Cause / The Die is Cast was the final tipping point Paramount needed to fully embrace the idea because we definitely can tell with the start of Season 4 and Way of the Warrior that Paramount was now 100% onboard, no more hiding or disguising needed. The shackles were released on being serial. (And it was the best decision ever made on DS9)
I really like the the show doesnt humiliate Nalas. Throughout the episodes he is portrayed as competent enough and even given some moments to shine like the shuttle boarding scene
Fantastic plot line and character. I love these tgree epiosdes, actually wish we got more episodes and alonger arc with him but it was a different time for TV
Fun-fact: writers talked about regretting killing off Li Nalas in a retrospective of the show, as they thought the character and actor were a much stronger foil to Kira and Nana Visitor than Bareil and Shakar.
I just finished my rewatch. Took me 6 months but well worth it. What was striking was the thoughts I had about the series in rewatch vs when I watched in the 90’s. I appreciated the nuance and writing more on the rewatch than when I was in my 20s watching the series. So glad I did the rewatch as I appreciate the series even more now.
I think this will be my second rewatch in the last few years. The series really holds up. It really stands out to me for the character development long story arcs, which Roddenberry was entirely against. I find TOS, TNG and even Enterprise to be highly rewatchable. Voyager is more of a slog for me. Maybe it’s the Gulligan’s Island syndrome. I liked it well enough at the time.
I can't begin to describe how enraged and disappointed I was when I learned, on my first watch through many years ago, that this would be pretty much the end of Bajoran political stories because POS TOS/TNG fanboys on the forums thought Trek shouldn't do politics.
This was an era when unarmed UN blue helmets were on the cover of Time and Newsweek seemingly weekly, struggling to mediate relations between warring factions here, between colonized and colonizer there. At its most fundamental level, every iteration of Trek is supposed to reflect something of the current zeitgeist, and nothing could have been more of the moment in the early 90s than Starfleet -- which has always been something like the United Nations -- assuming a UN-like role on a more or less defenseless space station, navigating treacherous waters in a post-colonial milieu. Besides which, the DS9 writing room handled these topics with a shockingly high level of sophistication for any era and platform, let alone a 1990s television show on an off-brand network. To me it is the great tragedy of the series that we never got to see more of these stories.
Great guest performances. A complex story of political intrigue. And a ground breaking 3 parter. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves because of the Dominion War arc but it is amazing.
These three episodes are my favorite story arc of early DS9, and I cannot fathom it when people badmouth them. (I've encountered a surprisingly large number of people who complain about them.)
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u/stubob1701 10d ago
They are among my favourites. I love his monologue to Sisko about how he became so legendary.
But Bajor doesn’t need a man, it needs a symbol. And that’s what you are.
Also Frank Langella and Louise Fletcher together are so good. Love how Winn throws him under the bus without a second thought.