[Pxtl]

It's hard because the shows both have their own merits. TNG easily had the best cast of any Trek show, but the show is limited by being allergic to continuity and the uniformity of its all-military characters.

DS9's writing wasn't really any better than TNG - there were some great episodes and many forgettable bits of filler. But DS9, in spite of its static setting, had more room to grow thanks to being willing to let the story change and develop, plus having a large cast of recurring characters outside of Starfleet/Bajoran military. The characters that made the show great were Winn and Garak and Ducat and Wayoun and Quark - a stellar cast of recurring villains and peripheral characters.

The problem is that the show tried to tries to force a Kirk/Spock relationship between Sisko and Dax when they're just plain bad actors. It's a shame since the show was really built around them. Avery Brooks tries to sound intense but he comes off just being a bad ham, and Terry Farrell tries to sound serene but ends up just being wooden.

That and I'll never forgive the show for making me hate Worf. Seriously, DS9 Worf is a jerk.

[jonnathanson]

Avery Brooks can ham it up like nobody's business. When he's bad, he's really bad. Like, when he starts making strange, high-pitched sounds and squeals, or bursts into theatrical outrage. But when he's good, he's pretty damned good. Sisko is a conflicted, tormented character. I think you need to see Brooks's performance in that light. He is not the classic do-gooder, overachiever, always-makes-the-right-call Starfleet captain you see in every other Trek series. He is often wrong. He is not on a fast track. He is not getting various maneuvers named after him, or making the textbooks and history books in real time. When the series starts, he's a broken and bitter man assigned to a career-killing backwater post. That post happens to become strategically important, and he's forced to rise to the challenge. But he's still got all of that baggage to deal with, and he still has his flaws. To make matters worse, he finds himself the unwitting messiah figure to an entire race of alien people. He didn't ask for any of this. But he steps up, slowly and clumsily at times, and finds himself again. I think Sisko is one of the more nuanced characters Trek has ever given us, and if you can look past Avery Brooks's hammy tendencies, you can see a lot of merit in both the actor and the character. Brooks's acting is at its best when Sisko's not at one or the other extreme end of the emotional spectrum. When Sisko's at about a 4 to an 8, Brooks is superb. When Sisko's in the 1-3 or 9-10 ranges, look out, here comes the ham.

Dax as Spock? I think things started out that way, or perhaps were initially intended to be that way. But she was pretty un-Spocklike for most of the series. Farrell was not a world-class actor by any means. But her performance kind of got better as it went along, and as the writers gave Dax more to work with. And she was a lot better than Ezri Dax by a wide mile. (Not that that's saying much.)

DS9 Worf is a controversial figure. I loved his post-Dax arc. He rose to the occasion and became a true hero. Perhaps my biggest issue with Worf in DS9 is that the show pretty much forgets all of what happened in TNG, and forgets that Worf is half human. It's as if they recast him as 100% Klingon, rewiring all of his backstory and his personality traits accordingly. You get none of the "Which world do I really belong to?" drama that made him interesting in TNG. Instead, he's Alpha Klingon Badass all of the time. It's ironic, because DS9 is the one Trek series that (in my opinion) fleshed out the Klingon race into something fantastic and multifaceted and real. I was never a huge Klingon fan until DS9 came along, and after having seen DS9, I was totally into them.

[pzxc]

Worf isn't half-human, he was just raised by humans. He was never about "choosing between two worlds" like Spock was, rather his background was more of the "stranger in a strange land" variety -- growing up in an alien environment, he had to become even MORE Klingon to retain his heritage, thus he always took everything seriously, especially Klingon matters like rituals and honor. Early on in the show they established that pretty well when Guinan pointed out that Klingons laugh, but Worf really doesn't (although he softens as time goes on, especially once he gets involved with Dax).

Troi, on the other hand, was explicitly half-human, although it seems that was only because the telepathy that comes with being full-Betazoid would destroy too many of the plotlines -- nobody remembers her mixed heritage all that much and we keep having to be reminded of it when it becomes relevant.

[jonnathanson]

Ok, wow, I stand corrected then. I apologize. For some reason I'd always assumed he was half-human; I don't know where that assumption came from. Maybe it's a bit of mental conflation, given how frequently other aliens-on-the-bridge in Trek series are half human.

Even still, I do think he was choosing between two worlds. Pretty much every time he encountered Klingons in TNG, they made comment about his wearing a Federation uniform and serving under humans. And there were several occasions where the derision went the other way: humans (or non-humans) would chide Picard for having a Klingon officer. Whether we choose to call this trope "stranger in a strange land," "choosing between two worlds," or something else altogether, the fact remains that Worf was an atypical Klingon in atypical circumstances, often forced to choose between whether he was to pursue his Klingon heritage and familial obligations to their fullest, or whether he was to be a Federation/Starfleet officer -- the requirements and laws of which often ran in direct contradiction to Klingon ethics. That was, indeed, a major source of drama for Worf throughout his character's appearance on TNG.

In DS9, yes, you could say he chose to be a Klingon. And by the end of the show, he made that choice unequivocally. Even still, it would have been nice to have had some remnant of the conflict remain. If only because that conflicted forces tradeoffs.

[djur]

DS9's cast was much better than TNG's. Patrick Stewart is the only actor on TNG I'd consistently rate above the bulk of DS9's cast.

[morganvachon]

As much as I like supporting actors like Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman, who can shine through the makeup and portray their characters realistically, I have to disagree regarding the main casts. I think they are about even as far as acting ability; from TNG you have excellent actors in Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, and LeVar Burton, generally good acting in Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, and Jonathan Frakes, And "good enough" from the rest.

In DS9, you had great acting from the above mentioned Auberjonois and Shimerman, though both could ham it up as well. Passing performances by Avery Brooks and Nana Visitor were the norm but they were both known to shine as well as fall flat. Alexander Siddig is an enigma; he was so good at being annoying that one might dismiss him before realizing that he was the perfect choice for the role. Poor Cirroc Lofton, like Wil Wheaton, suffered from the "kid surrounded by grownups" typecasting that often kills a child star's career. Both are decent actors but were never allowed to grow very much with their roles. And again, the remaining cast were neither great nor horrid.

In short, both casts had a range of acting ability, and even the best actor can't always rescue a bad script or director. But to say one is hands-down the best compared to the other is, at best, blind favoritism ("I liked one show better than the other so the other cast must suck").

[philsnow]

I love every TNG Q episode because there's something about the combination of John de Lancie and Patrick Stewart.

None of Q's appearances on DS9 or VOY had nearly the chemistry.

I guess JdL wasn't a "cast" member of TNG though.

[jonnathanson]

Q was pretty clearly designed as an antagonist and foil for Jean-Luc Picard, and he never made a lot of sense in the other series. He was brought into those series, like the Borg, for ratings stunts. And it showed.

[philsnow]

mercifully, they didn't bring him into Enterprise

... right ? i don't know, i watched only a few episodes of enterprise

[jonnathanson]

Thankfully, the writers of Enterprise never panicked and pushed the Q button the way Voyager's did. The Borg make a questionable and continuity-challenging [1] appearance on Enterprise, but Q never does.

I watched all of Enterprise. It...gets better in Seasons 3 and 4. That's about all I can say. The first season is pretty bad. Season 2 has a few good episodes. In Season 3, things start to pick up a bit, and Season 4 is legitimately interesting. The show never quite reaches the heights of TNG, DS9, or TOS. But it gets pretty good. I'd only recommend watching it all the way through if you're ready to wade past the early crap, though.

[1] This is kind of a mixed bag. The explanation for their appearance stems from the events of Star Trek: First Contact, in which a small detachment of Borg drones are left behind on Earth in the 20th Century. So the timeline has been altered a bit, and hence, those remnant Borg show up in Enterprise. On the flip side, you'd think that an early encounter with the Borg would have stuck in everyone's memory a little bit, and that Picard wouldn't have been shocked upon first encountering them. The episode acknowledges the issue, at least, and attempts to arrive at a workaround. The fix is clever, if not entirely satisfactory.

[philsnow]

> The fix is clever, if not entirely satisfactory.

klingon augment virus, got it