Random Dude Watches 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'

So, I've been working my way through the various Stars Trek over the past two years or so, and I've finally gotten to Deep Space Nine.  And, inspired by liebkartoffel 's good TNG rewatch thread, I decided to start my own thread on my own thoughts about DS9.  As I'm sure that if this thread is of interest to anyone, it'll mostly be of interest to people who've already seen DS9, which I have not seen before, I'll ask that if you want to discuss spoiler-y things that happen later on in the show, that you put said spoilers in spoiler tags.  I really don't know a lot about what happens in DS9, other than that Worf shows up after TNG ends and eventually there's a war.  Anyway, I've watched the first four episodes over the last couple of days, so here's my thoughts on them.

"Emissary, Parts 1 and 2" - Commander Benjamin Sisko was a Starfleet officer serving on one of the ships that got destroyed by the Borg Cube under the command of Picard-as-Locutus in the good good TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds".  While he escaped with his son Jake, Sisko's wife Jennifer died in the attack.  Now it's two years later or whatever, and Commander Sisko has been given command of Deep Space Nine, a formerly Cardassian space station orbiting Bajor, a planet which the Cardassians have spent the last 60 years occupying.  The Cardassians have, however, withdrawn from Bajor, and a provisional government has been set up by the Bajorans, who have requested a Federation presence in the system while the planet tries to get back on its feet after 60 years of brutal imperialist occupation, although Bajor is not itself a Federation planet.  I do not know if the Cardassians' decision to stop occupying Bajor has anything to do with the events of the TNG episode "Nineteen Eighty-Four In Space!", which was the last TNG episode to air before DS9 premiered and which has Cardassians in it.  Anyway, Sisko isn't super pleased about being in charge of DS9 and he plans to request another assignment; his son Jake is like eleven or so and isn't super cool with living on a dreary space station that doesn't have a lot of kids on it.  Also for some reason Captain Picard, the dude who was forced by the Borg to murder Sisko's wife, is the guy who briefs Sisko on his new assignment, which is awkward.  Also serving on DS9 are Odo, the head of security, an alien of unknown species who can do all sorts of Animorphs-shit, but who also doesn't know where he came from or even if there are other living members of his species in the galaxy.  There's also Major Kira, the Bajoran liaison to Starfleet, who in the pilot is basically a cut rate version of Ensign Ro from TNG, and she is not very pleased with the Federation's involvement in Bajoran affairs.  Then there's Lieutenant Dax, an old friend of Sisko's, although as she is a Trill who recently changed hosts, Sisko is only meeting her in her current body for the first time.  Doctor Bashir is a young Starfleet practitioner eager to engage in whatever the 24th Century equivalent of frontier medicine is, but his main character trait at this point is "wants to have sex with Dax" which makes for some pretty not-great scenes of him being super awkward and annoying around the source of his infatuation (although thankfully they don't play up the fact that Dax was recently male for homo/transphobic laughs the way that they did at the end of the Trill-based TNG episode "Dr. Crusher Gets Shamed Into Having Sex With Her Platonic Work Friend Riker").  Chief Petty Officer O'Brien from TNG is joining DS9 as the Chief of Operations, which is cool because O'Brien is basically the best of the secondary non-Ro TNG characters, but also kind of weird since O'Brien is sort of a Cardassian-racist, having fought against them in the war between the Federation and the Cardassians.  Then there's Quark, who isn't part of Starfleet or the Bajoran provisional government but rather a Ferengi...casino owner/restaurateur/con-man or something, who Sisko and Odo fascist-law-enforcement their way into coercing to stay on DS9 by threatening to lock up his ~11 year old nephew Nog for stealing some cheap plastic props, because DS9's business owners are all jumping ship now that the Cardassians are gone and they need to keep some businesses in the area even though they live in a post-money economy or whatever.  Anyway, after we're introduced to the main cast, Sisko is convinced by some priest guy to go meet with the Bajoran Pope or something because Bajor is split up into a bunch of political factions, the provisional government doesn't seem to be up to the task of governing the planet, so civil war seems likely, and religion is the one thing that unites all of Bajor, so the Bajoran Pope (who I'll just call BP until one of you inevitably gets outraged and informs me of what her actual name and title are).  So Sisko goes to the Bajoran Vatican where he's informed by BP that these weird glowing orbs of floating light which are apparently the most sacred artifacts to the Bajoran faith, have gone missing, they can probably guide one to some important holy site, and BP is worried that the Cardassians have some of the other glowing orbs and will find the holy site first.  So after the glowing orb makes Sisko hallucinate the time that he met his wife, he departs with the orb to meet up with Dax, who is able to pinpoint the location where all the glowing orbs probably originated, so they take a shuttlecraft out to the location and find that there's a stable wormhole out there that takes them to the...Gamma?...Quadrant, which is a...different?...quadrant from where most of Star Trek happens, and as a stable wormhole has never been found before (I think there was a mediocre Season 2 episode about a planet whose people thought they'd discovered or invented a stable wormhole but then it turned out that it wasn't stable), this is a big deal.  However, on the way back, Dax gets transported back to DS9 and Sisko is kept by the wormhole, which appears to either be a non-corporeal entit(y/ies) or to have been created by said entit(y/ies) who is/are very interested in what the deal is with these corporeal entities traveling through their wormhole.  Meanwhile, back on DS9, Major Kira et. al. try to keep the wormhole a secret from the Cardassians, but a Cardassian ship travels through the wormhole anyway and gets trapped on the other side, and some other Cardassian ship captained by some dude named Golduck (except he's a Cardassian, not the Pokemon Golduck) or something become convinced that DS9 has destroyed the other Cardassian ship, and demands that Major Kira et. al. surrender to them.  Kira et. al. are able to hold out for a while thanks to O'Brien's knowledge of Star Trek technobabble, though, at least until Sisko is able to convince the Wormhole Entit(y/ies) that corporeal entities don't aren't inherently violent and don't all deserve to die solely on the basis of their experiencing time in a linear fashion, and he and the Cardassians are let back out of the wormhole into Bajor space.  Golduck calls off his attack, and the Wormhole Entit(y/ies) let everyone know that they're cool with corporeal ships using their stable wormhole to travel to the...Gamma?...Quadrant, so now Bajor is not only a planet with a tenuously functional provisional government, but DS9 is also a hot new interstellar transit hub.  And Sisko has a slightly less awkward meeting with Picard where he announces that he's totally interested in remaining assigned to DS9.

This was an alright episode of Star Trek.  It was much better than "Encounter at Farpoint", TNG's pilot episode, in that the resolution was way less dumb, the characters seem a little better defined from the outset, but mostly, instead of being a heavy handed morality tale about how Q is wrong about human nature, Sisko's encounter with the Wormhole Entit(y/ies) is actually a kinda moving exploration of his grief over his wife's death.  This is much more because of Avery Brooks' performance more so than the script itself, which is a fairly run-of-the-mill Trek-protagonists-meet-a-non-corporeal-entity-whose-understanding-of-the-universe-is-more-transcendent-than-ours story, but Brooks makes the best of the material he's given and turns it into a decent episode.  Also, if you consider "Captain Kirk et. al. Meet the Salt Monster" to be the pilot episode of TOS, then "Emissary" is probably a better pilot than that too.  It's definitely not great; Quark is annoying, Kira is a little too one note here, and the Bashir-hitting-on-Dax stuff is pretty misogynistic.  But ultimately I'm really interested to see how the situation develops for the Bajor and DS9, as this is supposed to be the least episodic of the pre-Discovery Stars Trek, which has me more invested in even a middling episode like this one than I would be in a similarly middling episode of TNG. B-

Edit:  I suspect my entries on most future episodes will be much shorter, as this was a two-part episode and the pilot, so there was a lot of exposition required to provide even a short summary of the plot to this one.