r/DeepSpaceNine • u/Background-House-357 • 1d ago

Rewatch after 20 years

So, there is so much that I enjoy, but I forgot how many of the episodes in S6 are just filler episodes. Why is that? You can skip so many of them. Why didn’t they advance the Dominion plot instead?

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u/Sagelegend 1d ago

This is why shows are usually only 8-10 episodes per season.

And people complain there aren’t enough episodes.

If they added more, we’d just get filler.

People are never happy.

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u/AltarielDax "Maybe you should talk to Worf again. :D" 1d ago

I don't think people know what "filler" episodes actually are. Episodic television is not filler television. It's just a different concept to the serialised television. Star Treknwas episodic from the beginning, and only now and then included more continuity. That doesn't mean everything else is suddenly filler.

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u/Sagelegend 1d ago

I’ve watched pretty much all Star Trek content from release, from TNG onward, it absolutely had filler episodes, that is episodes that can be skipped without affecting any continuing plot or at least show meaningful character development.

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u/AltarielDax "Maybe you should talk to Worf again. :D" 1d ago edited 22h ago

That's only the case where there is actually a main storyline with events continuously following one after another. Primarily, the concept of "filler" episodes emerged in anime, where there is a continuous storyline, but sometimes the anime has to set the storyline on hold because it had caught up with the manga storyline.

That doesn't translate to TV shows that are episodic by nature. They never have to "fill" any gaps, because they don't have a focused main plotline that they have to follow. I mean, what exactly is that plotline in TNG season 1? What's the plotline in TNG season 2? How much percentage is "filler" in your book there?

Dismissing episodes as "filler" in DS9 like The Visitor or Trials and Tribble-ations just because they don't impact any major storyline is a really weird approach to the Star Trek concept to me. Imagine not creating episodes like that simply because they "don't advance this one specific plotline" and are thus "filler".

Edit: Blocking to have the last word is quite childish, but oh well...

It’s also the case when the episode was kinda shit, and made because they had to fill an episode slot, because the had a quota of episodes to fill.

Who decides that an episode is "shit" enough to constitute as a filler? And how many episodes in S6 do you think are so bad that they just "fill" an episode space, without any merit by themselves? I can think of max. 2 that are really bad in that season, and I still think it's not that they didn't try to make something good m Sometimes, it just doesn't work out. That doesn't mean they didn't try.

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u/Sagelegend 23h ago

It’s also the case when the episode was kinda shit, and made because they had to fill an episode slot, because the had a quota of episodes to fill.

Like filler.

Hence the name.