Deep Space Nine’s Best Political Thriller Is Still Challenging
Earth under siege... maybe.
In Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise never returned to Earth. In The Next Generation, Picard’s Enterprise-D visited every once in a while, and when Deep Space Nine debuted, the basic premise put the crew on the fringes of the Federation. But in a two-part thriller that aired 30 years ago, on January 1 and January 8, 1996, Deep Space Nine took a trip back to idealistic 24th-century Earth, where even paradise could turn into a snakepit.
With “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost,” DS9 tackled paranoia, authoritarianism, and military overreach. These episodes also continued to challenge how the Trek audience regarded Starfleet. In peacetime, Starfleet had time to sit around and discuss its problems. But what about during a brewing interstellar conflict?
Sisko and Odo on Earth.
Season 4 was a turning point for Deep Space Nine. Worf (Michael Dorn) joined the cast, bringing some recent Next Generation nostalgia to the series. Meanwhile, the series focused on the growing threat of the Changelings infiltrating various governments; when anyone could be a shapeshifter, the Federation and Starfleet started to freak out.
In “Homefront,” Sisko (Avery Brooks) and Odo (René Auberjonois) are recalled to Earth by Admiral Leyton (Robert Foxworth) as security consultants after a diplomatic conference is bombed. This puts Sisko back in his TNG-style uniform for most of the episode, a symbolic choice that represents what the episode is all about: does the idealized world of TNG actually make sense under scrutiny?
By taking Deep Space Nine out of deep space, these episodes brought the series’ gritty, unflinching style to Earth’s sunny atmosphere. It’s one thing when Trek is talking about Bajorians and Cardassians, but when Earth itself became a target of criticism, DS9 was pushing a boundary that other Trek series rarely did.
Is Leyton the worst evil admiral ever? Or the most realistic?
Social allegories are all well and good, but in the TNG era, questionable acts were performed by other species and governments, not the Federation and Starfleet. “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost” invert this by having Sisko pressure an ineffective Federation president to increase security measures on Earth; this includes having Starfleet officers with phasers in the street, and mandatory blood tests for officers and their families to check for shapeshifters.
The audience is on Sisko’s side for much of part one; a shapeshifter really did plant a bomb on Earth, and we’d seen the folks on the station do all sorts of things to try and find spies and saboteurs. So, it’s not until Sisko’s father, Joseph Sisko (Brock Peters), really pushes back on the implicit violation of his civil liberties that we start to wonder what else might be going on. Sisko was right to team up with Leyton to make Earth safer, right?
As we learn in part two, Leyton didn’t plant the bomb, but he did engineer a blackout and make it appear that a cloaked fleet of Dominion warships was on its way to Earth. There’s a smart mix of real threats versus contrived ones here, as actual enemy shapeshifters do appear in both episodes, masquerading as Leyton, and later, as Chief O’Brien (Colm Meaney). A weaker version of this story — perhaps one you could imagine on TNG — would have suggested the bomb was fake, that there were no Changelings on Earth, and that Leyton was just a lunatic with a lust for power. But we learn that Sisko was once Leyton’s first officer and, crucially, he really respects the guy.
Starfleet, on the brink of internecine conflict.
Today, it’s easy to say that Leyton represents a real-life politician motivated by power and militarism, and that’s true. But DS9 makes Sisko, the more progressive character, friends with him, which makes Sisko complicit in the erosion of human rights, which only becomes clear to us when Sisko’s dad starts ranting at him. Leyton isn’t a mustache-twirling villain, and in the grand pantheon of duplicitous Starfleet admirals, he comes across as one of the calmer and more reasonable figures.
This story works because, just like in Star Trek VI, we’re initially on the side of a Starfleet captain whose views seem a little more conservative. Kirk never trusted Klingons and never would. Sisko knows how to fight the Dominion and isn’t afraid to do a hardcore phaser sweep if he has to. But in both stories, we learn that even though we might agree with the basic premise that the enemy is horrible and dangerous, we can’t cross certain lines to fight back.
Star Trek hasn’t always made sense of the dichotomy that Starfleet is both a military organization and a group of space explorers. But with these two episodes, Deep Space Nine managed to make you feel a new way about Starfleet: happy that people like Sisko are around to see through the amoral fog, but worried that Starfleet is always on the verge of turning into one of the empires it stands against.
