1x13 Battle Lines

[5.5/10] War is bad. And futile. So is violence. I don’t know if you knew that. But Deep Space Nine wants to make sure you do.

I’m being glib there, but it speaks to the level of thudding messaging and general dullness in “Battle Lines”. I’m still working on my theory that DS9 is the piece of 1990s Trek most indebted to The Original Series, and this episode might be my exhibit A. You could shave off the serial numbers here, swap out some characters, cheese up the effects and setting, and you would pretty much have something out of the adventures of Kirk and Spock.

Sisko, Kira, and Bashir crash-land on a secluded planet in the Gamma Quadrant after trying to give Kai Opaka a tour of the wormhole. There, they find an abandoned penal colony where the two groups of inhabitants have been at war for ages. Pretty standard Star Trek stuff. There’s a catch though. The planet’s residents are effectively immortal, being kept alive as an eternal punishment and example of the futility of armed conflict.

I don’t mind the setup. Star Trek has done societies at war with strange, metaphor-fueling wrinkles before (TOS’s “A Taste of Armageddon”). And it’s done pointless struggles, where the people involved were socialized into the conflict and thus too blind and vengeful to see what a needless waste it is. (TOS’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”) There’s juice in the concept of people who cannot accomplish anything in their fighting and pain, but continue their fruitless brutality anyway.

Hell, I even like the show’s half-baked attempt to connect it to Kira! The notion that she too has been marked and even conditioned by the violence she’s seen and perpetrated, and needs to heal, is a strong one. The material isn’t great, but Nana Visitor gives a superb performance, both when she mourns the death of her symbol of hope for her people, and confesses to that same symbol that she fears her gods will not forgive her for the things she’s done. Visitor nails the pathos in these moments, elevating an undercooked thematic subplot into something moving through performance alone.

That said, this episode gave me a little piece of mind. Candidly, it’s startling how much overacting there is across the board in Deep Space Nine’s first season. I remembered these actors fondly, and wondered if I’d just been too pre-critical when I watched the show originally to notice their performances tended to go overboard, or if there was just something about the show’s approach in these early seasons that lent itself to that.

Here comes Jonathan Banks to suggest it’s the latter. Banks plays Shel-la, the leader of one of the terrestrial combatant groups. But most folks likely know him better as Mike Ehrmantraut, the fixer for hire in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He’s an extraordinary actor in that role, finding new depths and places to take Ehrmantraut in terms of demeanor and emotion across two series. He’s also the king of underplaying and understatement, something the role practically demands.

And yet here, he’s very much in line with the tone of DS9 to this point: a little too showy and over-the-top in his character’s grand proclamations and high volume reactions to everything. Some of that’s the writing, I’m sure. But I also think it speaks to what the show’s directors and producers were asking for from their actors, and Banks falling into the same traps heere helps reassure me that I didn’t hallucinate the better, more measured performances I remember from later seasons.

Otherwise, there’s not much of note here. The B-story is about as generic a Star Trek subplot as you’ll ever find. Chief O’Brien and Dax have to find Sisko and company for a rescue. The only challenge is a technical one, which Miles overcomes by inventing some new magnetic detection system he describes with a “needle in a haystack” metaphor and builds on the fly. It’s a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem without any challenge or character. The results feel like a ministerial act on the part of the show to fill time.

Therein lies the other big comparison to the 1960s Star Trek series. Not only is this a standard “Visit a planet where the thin metaphor of the residents’ way of life really makes you think” plot, but there’s about half an episode’s worth of incident stretched out to full episode length here. Little changes while our heroes are down on the planet, with a few more bits of exposition being spooned out here and there, but little in the way of choices made or actions taken by the characters.

The little of that we get comes when Sisko offers to take the planets’ inhabitants off world, so they can break the curse of immortality if they so choose. It’s a welcome invitation for Shel-la, but one neither side can accept despite an impromptu peace summit because they can’t stop warring long enough to let the other side benefit from something that would also benefit them. The same goes when Dr. Bashir realizes that leaving the planet would mean instant death for the locals, but they could at least reprogram the artificial microbes keeping them immortal to turn off so they could live natural lives here. Shel-la can’t see it as an escape from this curse, but only as something his side could use on their enemies to wipe them out.

Again, the writers are hitting the audience over the head with a 2x4 when it comes to the message here. There’s no humanity in these people. There’s no realism to their debates. They’re just self-evidently pawns in an extended allegory for the futility of warfare with no inner lives or purposes beyond communicating that message. Well, the message comes in clear, but the delivery mechanism is a boring one, full of flat characters and blunt scenes that, ironically, detract from the effectiveness of the point made so clearly.

The only bit of intrigue is the decision to leave Kai Opaka on the planet with them, to spare her the instant death and give the hint that maybe she can help these people heal like she helped Kira. There’s at least some boldness to the choice to effectively strand the Pope on an alien rock without any assistance because they’re that committed to helping people achieve peace. But it’s thin, underdone gruel in an episode that doesn’t do much else of interest.

I still like The Original Series quite a bit. Its high points stand up with the best episodes of all the shows that came in its wake. But it could just as easily devolve into ham-fisted messaging and shallow metaphors when the series’s creative team was stumbling. Thankfully, Deep Space Nine would generally avoid such pitfalls (occasionally finding its own, just as it found its own high points), but an episode like “Battle Lines” bring to mind some familiar missteps in the franchise.