CZM Reverse Book Club: Talking "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" with Bridget, Hazel, and All of You

Hello and.

Welcome to Cool Zone Media.

And Book Club, the only podcast usually where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. But this time, there was no reading at all unless you use subtitles like me. Because this time, We're talking about a television show, one particular episode of one particular television show. But first, I want to introduce that I'm not alone on the call, like you heard. We have Hazel, our producer. We also have Bridget Todd, who's here. Hi, Bridget Todd.

Hi, Marg. Hi, Hazel. Thank you for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here in the book club, book club, book club.

We're so happy to have you, and I'm so glad it worked out.

Yeah.

So if you're listening and you're like, wasn't this supposed to be last week? Well, unfortunately, there was this horrible disease that was unearthed upon the world six years ago and still has lingering effects.

Yeah.

I don't know whether, Bridget, you want to.

A little thing called COVID. I had it. I was so sad to not be able to join. And part of me was like, I can just do it. And maybe sounding loopy, it'll sound like Afro-futurist, you know, people will think, wow, she's really deep.

The future is the same as the past, but all of it feels like a fever.

I thought I could maybe disguise my COVID fog as deep thoughts about the show, man. Yeah, a little PSA. I had to go to the hospital. I'm fine now. But the doctor told me that multiple people who had come in before me were also there for COVID. So she was like, tell everybody COVID is having a moment right now. You know, do what you got to do.

Protect yourself. But yeah, it's out there.

Yeah, well, I'm so glad you're feeling better.

Same. Yeah, they gave me all the good drugs.

Hell yeah.

So, Hazel, do you want to talk to us about Deep Space Nine?

Margaret, I'd love to talk to you about Deep Space Nine. This is one of my favorite things to talk about in the world.

Yeah.

So we are, even though it's September now, we're finishing out our Black August series where we're just reading stories, you know, about Black revolutionary history, about prison abolition, and about remembering our murders. And, you know, we wanted to, we've been doing these kind of reverse episodes where we ask y'all to do a reading or watch an episode and give us your thoughts so we can have more of a book club. And we thought we'd do that today since a big part of Black August is reading together and studying together. Yeah, and as a show doing sci-fi and speculative fiction and all of us are Trekkies to some degree or another, we figured we'd.

Do a Star Trek episode because why not?

It's easy to watch an episode and there's a lot to talk about. So if you haven't yet watched Star, Deep Space Nine, Season 6, Episode 13, called Far Beyond the Stars. You know, just be aware that you're going to be in for some spoilers. Maybe you'll pause, watch the episode if you want, and then you can rejoin us here for a discussion.

Okay, now everyone's back from watching it.

I ordinarily would never tell somebody to turn off a podcast that I'm making. But this is a situation where it's such a good episode. And even if you're not somebody who has been a religious watcher of Deep Space Nine, it's a self-contained story. So genuinely, people should watch it. Even if you're like, I'm not really into Star Trek, you should watch it.

Yeah, it takes place in 1950s United States, which is not the same as the normal Star Trek universe for those who are not familiar with Star Trek.

That's a very good way to put it. Not the same as what they're usually dealing with in Star Trek.

Although they do go back to that kind of, I expected this to be a holodeck episode. I went in assuming it was a holodeck episode. Okay, sorry, anyway.

Anyway, we're just going to talk about this. A number of you submitted your comments on Reddit, so we'll also be reading your stuff. If that sounds fun, you know, keep listening, keep watching for more.

Opportunities where we do stuff like this.

Yeah.

Should we just start with like an overview of the episode?

Margaret and Bridget, what did you think happened?

Oh, what do I think happened is such a different question than what I saw happening. Although normally it'd be the kind of same. Okay, it's been several days, but our hero, Captain Sisko, who's sort of the anti-hero of the show in really complicated ways, he loses his mind and he starts imagining that he is a writer in 1950s New York City, I assume.

Yeah, New York City, 1953.

1953.

He's working for a science fiction magazine. It's kind of like The Wizard of Oz where when Dorothy goes to Oz, characters that she saw in her Kansas life are also in Oz where you're like, I know you, you look familiar. So there's a very familiar cast of characters that make up the people that he works on this magazine with.

He has a, I guess it's the editor who, I would say the editor believes that he is like talented as a writer, but he's really busting his chops. He's like, oh, oh, sorry. It's the picture day for the magazine just to like lay out kind of the vibe here. And the black writer and the woman writer, it's like, doesn't even need to be said that they will not be photographed in the picture because their readers would never stand for it.

Remote work has always had its advantages and disadvantages.

You've got a face for writing science fiction, Paul. Oh, thanks. You're welcome.

And so this is kind of how the writer starts to introduce that this is going to be an episode about prejudice, about racism, and also about the history of sci-fi, which I think is really fun coming from Star Trek, which is one of like the pillars of sci-fi and pillars of like social commentary kinds of sci-fi. And we'll get into analysis stuff. But after they do the picture day conversation, the illustrator comes in and... you know, gives out, this is how they assign the stories for the week is the illustrator comes in with a bunch of these cool pictures and they kind of divvy out the pictures.

And Benny Russell, who again, this is in Star Trek universe, this is Captain Benjamin Sisko, but in 1953, hallucination, religious, prophetic space, you know, he's a black science fiction author, Benny Russell, gets assigned a picture that's like a charcoal sketch of DS9, of the space station that captain cisco works on in the future when he goes home to this very noir looking apartment with he's like a piano and there's all kinds of details that are like just beautiful it's so awesome it's really like a treat for the guys and again we're a shorter podcast so we can't cover the specific meaning of everything but he writes the story of what becomes the pilot of deep space nine he tells the story of benjamin cisco you know

the black captain of the spaceship in the future.

And during this time, he's having some, I would call, mild hallucinations. He, you know, encounters this baseball player in the diner where I think his partner works. And then he has like a little bit of a split. And then, wait, it's Worf. You know, it's like he's having these hallucinations that take him back to the ship and then back to what we understand as his present day, where he's almost sort of inhibiting both at the same time. At times, it's like he's dancing between 1950s New York City, where he is this Black science fiction writer, and a time 400 years in the future where he is the captain of this ship in space.

And then everyone he's talking to in the diner, I love the diner scenes maybe almost the most. Everyone he's talking to in the diner is reflecting a different version of how to cope with white culture as a black person in society, whether it's his partner who's like, look, the way that we're going to get ahead, you're going to stop writing your silly stories. You can still write them on the side, but we're going to go into business.

We're going to run this diner together, and that's how we're going to get ahead. Versus you have the baseball player who's like, no, this is the only way to have people's respect, right, is to be really good at this one thing. And then you have Jimmy the Hustler, played by Jake Sisko, his son, who comes in and is like, man, fuck all that. They're never going to respect you. Steal their shit. And all of them are treated respectfully. All of them are in tension with each other because none of them are doing what Benny Russell wants to do. And so they're all kind of in tension with him. But they're also all deeply... care about him, even though the baseball players, like his romantic rival, they

literally help each other up, you know?

Yeah, that was one of my favorite parts of the show. And so he writes this story, which is the pilot of Deep Space Nine. He brings it into his editor, and his editor is like, oh, they'll never greenlight a story where a black space captain, you know, make him white. He's like, that's not what I wrote. There's a A bit of a compromise where somebody on his writing team says, what if it's a dream? What if it's a dream sequence and, you know, this is just a Negro man's dream of the future and then he wakes up and it's not really real? Well, that, you know, placate the audiences.

And it seems like that's actually okay. And so even though it's a compromise to this very strong vision that he had for this, the story that he wanted to tell, he's like, okay, if this is what it takes to get this story published, I'll do it. He has a happy moment where he comes home and I think he gets three cents a word, which as somebody, I'm curious what you thought about that, Margaret, because that's somebody who was like, tries to get money for writing. You're like, oh, three cents a word, huh?

Well, what's funny is like three cents a word is like, I've been paid that.

Yeah. And mind you, this is taking place in the 50s.

And so I did some research. You know, the Science Fiction Writers of America is not a union, but it kind of sets what the pro rate is for pulp speculative fiction. If you're a pro magazine, you need to pay at least SFW rates in order to be taken seriously. And that rate is eight cents a word.

Now?

Yeah, now. Yeah, because it hasn't gone up since 2019, I think. It's been a minute since I've specifically been quite in those trenches because now I have easier time getting my fiction published than I did when I was like selling fiction and desperately looking up the cents a word. But three cents a word is the equivalent of 42 cents a word now. which is, again, eight-ish times, seven and a half times what the rate that a professional science fiction short story writer is expecting to get. So it's kind of funny because you're looking back at like ye olde bad times when you watch this, and you're like, even two cents a word, right, is 28 cents. And now, if you're writing articles, that's not the best rate. It's

been a minute since I've looked at this stuff, but... Sometimes for like a nonfiction article, you could be easily getting like a dollar a word if you're like really at the top of your game. But like also because the other thing I saw when I, you know, you get handed a picture and then you got to write a story based on it. And that's your work for the month. Oh, my God. That's a dream. That's a dream.

One story a month. Yeah.

Anyway. Yeah.

That was a weird workflow to me of like, here's how we assign the stories. The art guy draws an image and then just hands them out. And then you got to come up with a story based on that illustration. That's genius.

I love pulp. I love like, you're just like, all right, figure it out. I don't know what the story is. You know, and they have this scene where it's like, Quark is like, you know, ah, but the illustration is trash, but the story will be art.

Yeah.

I can't speak to like sci-fi pulp flows in the 1950s, but I think that that might be how some Star Trek episodes were written.

Huh.

Yeah.

I don't know a ton about this.

I was listening to another podcast in prep. Spoilers.

And they said that, yeah, like sometimes just like one of the producers would whip up a weird little freak alien and give it to the writers or maybe like roll with this and then roll with it.

That's sick. I love it. I love a prompt. So it all goes well. He writes the story. It's all a dream and everyone loves him and no one, especially not his son, dies.

Right?

Yeah, it's a really happy ending. It's a really short episode.

They're like, ah, you've made it.

Well, so Benny Russell, the 1950s author, takes his advance for the story to... He takes his girl out on the town.

They have a really nice night, but there's like a ruckus forming in the street.

Manny goes to check it out and comes on two cops who are the in-world equivalent of Gul Dukat and Weyoun, who are, they're like fashy bad guys.

In the Deep Space Nine universe.

But they are like investigating and have just murdered Jimmy, who's the hustler kid who in the Deep Space Nine universe is Jake Sisko.

That's his son.

I think in 1950s, I don't think that Benny and Jimmy are related, but it hits the audience hard because that's Jake.

That's our boy.

He's grown up on the show.

We met him as a 12-year-old, and now he's a journalist.

He's going off to see the world. He's coming up.

And again, we can sort of get into the nitty-gritty around how all of this stuff maps.

Well, what I was thinking... was that do you know who would never commit racist violence in a systemic way unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol?

Is it the products and services that support our podcast?

That's right. They probably have never committed racist violence. They might not have done this.

I don't know if this is a good bit, but we should throw to ads.

All right, fine. And we're back.

Yeah, to sort of bring this home.

So after Jimmy is murder at the hands of the police, Benny Russell intervenes. And I think we might have gotten the specific order of the episode a little bit out of order, but it's all vibes. We're not the experts here. If you want the experts, you can go to Starter Trek.

That's not us. We're just, we're just bitches.

They like beat the crap out of them, the police. And I will say something that, I mean, I know we're going to get into analysis in a minute, but it just enraged me to see where the, when the police are roughing the kid up, they're like, oh, well, he was breaking into cars with a crowbar. That was the excuse that we used to kill him. And just the idea that property destruction is violence and like deserving of You know, like property destruction is more important than the value of human life. It's like a vibe like that.

So like that's the excuse the police give as to why it's okay that they shot this kid in the street because he was using a crowbar to try to get into cars.

And also in that scene, you have the black cops in the background holding back the crowd. I'm sure that was not a coincidence.

Not at all.

And like a little bit radical for a statement for Star Trek to make, you know?

Seriously, yeah. So I think Cisco goes back to the editorial office, still thinking that, you know, well, at least my story is getting published. And there he finds that the story, that the whole episode, or episode, there he finds that the entire issue has been pulped. It's not going to run. And on top of that, he is also let go from his job at the science fiction magazine.

That's the end of the show, isn't it? Kind of wakes up at that point. It was all a dream.

Yeah, he has a big breakdown where he's like, you know, you can pulp a story, but you can't pulp an idea. What I came up with was real. I don't, you know, there's nothing you can do to me. It's a real, like... scene of acting gravitas. But then he wakes up on the ship and it's not clear to him whether or not that was a dream or his experience as Captain Sisko, the captain of this ship, whether that's a dream. You know, he's told at one point, you're both the dreamer and the dream. So I feel like we're sort of left kind of grappling with that a little bit.

And the thing I like about that, I don't usually like fourth wall breaking scenes. Like, I'm not a big meta story person. I tend to be pretty linear in my imagination. And I really liked this. This really worked for me, the way that it also calls in all of Star Trek, right? Because Star Trek is the dream.

Star Trek is the dream that was created by pulp writers. And this particular episode was created by the actor who's doing these things, you know? And I genuinely like the interplay of maybe the things that we create in our head are real, right? Like that's one of the things that Benny Russell keeps saying is like, no, these things that I've experienced, they're real. You can't get rid of them.

They've been written down. They are real. And it's, it's like saying story is real and you help create things. And like Star Trek has had actual effects on culture and anti-racism, right? And it's, it's, it is real. These stories matter. And I really like that it's intentionally this incredibly pulpy office and magazine, right? Because even when he's name dropping all of the other Black authors at the time, they're not pulp authors. Although Du Bois absolutely wrote trashy speculative fiction. You can listen to this show and hear Du Bois' fiction, but it wasn't presented as genre, I believe.

It was probably presented as literature just literally based on who did it.

Yeah, that really worked for me too. And a lot of the sort of wink, wink, nod, nod, like, oh, you know, like... Major Kira, or Kay, who she is in the 50s, being like, yeah, we need more representation of strong women leaders in science fiction. Look at this audience. I can see it being a little cheesy. I'm going to keep it real. It totally worked for me. I loved it. This has got to be, I mean, I'm not the deepest Star Trek person, but like, this has got to be one of the best episodes, right? If they're making lists of the best Deep Space Nine episodes, this has got to be top five of those lists, right?

Oh, I mean, it's my favorite.

Deep Space Nine episode it's my favorite episode of Star Trek a lot of the cast who worked on the show have also said like that this was their favorite one to work on listener I can't make your decisions for you but almost everybody that I know has this in their top three and.

It's nice too that like You can watch it out of order. I'm someone who kind of needs to watch things in order when at all possible. But this one, genuinely, it's a standalone. Should we talk about what listeners have to say about it and kind of talk about what we have to say about it?

Yeah, let's jump into it. Does anybody have a Reddit comment that they really wanted to get into? Or should I just go.

With the first one? My linear thinking brain was like, well, there's one in front of me and it's from Diogenes having a wee.

I wanted to say I.

Love our listeners and I love all of our listeners' clever, silly Reddit names. You guys are the best.

That one at Diogenes having a wee is a reference to urinating on rich people because Diogenes was a strange, homeless punk rock philosopher who I had many disagreements with his ideas. One of his ideas was you should go to rich people parties and then pee on people.

I love that you're doing a close read of just a Reddit name.

I love this.

Do you want to read it for us, Magpie?

Yeah, but I'm going to read it in a strange voice even though I don't remember what the comment says. DS9 did a lot of one-off high-concept episodes that came out of left field, and this is one of the best of them, IMO. Racism isn't an unheard-of topic for Star Trek to tackle, but this is the only episode I can think of that did away with analogies and addressed it head-on. Having Avery Brooks, Cisco's actor, direct the episode was a great choice. They specifically chose him because they wanted someone with direct experience with racism to direct it.

And it wasn't as weird of a voice as I was expecting. I'm sorry.

So I love the way that this episode deals with racism. And I think especially in the 90s, I have a soft spot for a lot of 90s television. And whenever a lot, not even 90s television that I liked when they were doing, you know, a very special episode about racism. I'm thinking about shows like Quantum Leap, which I loved, but like, go back and watch it. It does not really hold up in a lot of ways. And they really had a tendency to show racists as these like, singular monsters who just were full of hate, had hate coming out of their pores. What I like about this episode is that I would argue that the villain beyond the police is the editor who sees Benny as like talented and smart and like wants to give him a chance.

But that does not keep him from doing the bidding of their racist publication owner, right? That he's not portrayed, at least in my opinion, as like some like hate-filled, seething monster. And in some ways, that's kind of worse because it's more commonplace and more realistic.

Yeah, he's, like, representing his system.

I was gonna say, I think that really works well with the character that they chose for the editor is Odo, who is, like, the kind of stationed mall cop who is very, you know, lawfully aligned as very, like, kind of rules and by the books. And they kind of show how that... sort of attitude, you know, ends up holding up, you know, systems of oppression.

Even when his name is Douglas Pabst as.

The editor, you know, like you said, believes in Benny, thinks he's a talented writer, doesn't seem to personally have anything against the story, but just, you know, isn't brave enough to stand up to his editor and advocate for Benny and doesn't trust his audiences to, you know, take a chance on.

Something that might be a little bit outside of what they're typically sold.

Would you say that there's no blue ribbon for this, Pabst?

I might give you that one. Excellent.

And we're back.

I have a lot of love in my heart for Avery Brooks. Avery Brooks went to Oberlin College, which listeners, please forget this as soon as I say it.

That's my album honor.

So I was watching Deep Space Nine while I was in college and, you know, then would go to meetings at the student union where there like, you know, was a picture of Avery Brooks, you know, for his, he, you know, came back to do, he studied theater at Oberlin College and he would, you know, come back periodically to do, you know, special master classes in acting. And I don't know, that just like always felt really special to feel kind of this tie in with like Captain Sisko and Avery Brooks and knowing that, you know, we sort of are coming from the same place. And I think also I want to say like Avery Brooks, put so much intention into this episode. There's so many little Easter eggs in the set decoration and in the costuming.

And then to also be the main featured voice or the main featured actor in the show is just such a labor of love into making this. And I can tell that it's something that Avery advocated for. He's talked a lot about his experience as an African-American man on the set of Star Trek.

And doesn't have like.

A lot of the actors kind of go to the cons and are really involved in the fan base. And he's kind of put Star Trek behind him, if I'm remembering correctly, in a large part because of racism that he dealt with. And it's really cool to like kind of see these places where he is interjecting himself and his experiences and making.

The show his own.

Racism in the fandom community I'm not I'm the first I'm hearing of that are you sure no I I'm with you and I will say like watching this episode it was almost like bittersweet to watch knowing all of that and then exactly as you said Hazel the ways that the Set design, so many little details. The way that the episode is just this tender and beautiful depiction of Black intellectual life through not just writing, but sports, dance, fashion, art, dreaming, religion.

Crime. I'm just going to shout out crime.

I like Jimmy.

Yeah, it's like... There's a scene where he comes home and there's that huge book of poetry, The Ways of White Folks. And there's a poem in that collection where he talks about how the tom-tom laughs, the tom-tom cries, right? Like it's singing, dancing, and sports, but also crime, also getting hassled by the cops, also like getting harassed at work.

Like the episode does such a beautiful, tender job of portraying this, I don't know, dynamic vision of Black intellectual life in the 50s that I just think is so... It's so loving. It's clearly a labor of love, as you said.

Yeah.

I think that is when Avery Brooks would have been growing up. It feels so lived in because he lived it.

And you mentioned the Langston Hughes book, which I love, and I love that specific edition because I'm pretty sure that that edition would have been printed in the late 80s, which means that it's from the future. We're still getting this richness of like you said, Black intellectual culture sort of across time and Benny Russell is like living in the future. And obviously that's just like set dresser, didn't want to go find a book from the 50s.

But everything is intentional and like you can find these.

Little ripples of meaning. And even if it's unintentional, like I think that it just makes it smarter. Like I love it when a piece of media is smarter than the people who write it and put it together.

Bridget, you talked about The way that 90s racism and anti-racism was dealt with on TV, this ties into Langston Hughes and everything you were just saying, Hazel. It all comes together in my head. There's this very, very different way that this is handling it than almost everything, as you mentioned, about 90s trying to deal with race. Because in the 90s, TV was just trying to do like, I don't see race, right? It was seen as very normal for me to also watch Family Matters as like a white girl, right? And like identify just as much with Urkel as with I actually can't come up with a comparable character in a white family on a sitcom off the top of my head. I watched a lot of Family Matters. But that left me with this sense

of not understanding racism, right? Because of the way it was presented when you only have like the evil monster. And it was actually Langston Hughes poetry and a very patient English teacher who talked this out of me.

Right?

Because I came up in this like, ah, race doesn't matter unless you're a horrible monster. And I was reading all this Langston Hughes poetry for school. And I was like, well, I don't get why all of this ties back into race. Isn't this a kind of universal feeling that he's describing? And my English teacher just like patiently sat with me for a moment and was like, this is why this matters.

And it was just like a little like, light bulb where I'm like, ah, now I understand. And so this episode just does so much better than the other media at the time. I was expecting, because some of the stuff I think we're going to talk about later is about the racialization of Bashir, who is a white-presenting, non-white person, and then also Quark. I don't remember their names in this episode. I struggle to remember one name for people.

And so Quark is Jewish in this episode, right?

It's a Jewish commie. Yeah.

And like, I was going into it assuming that the writers weren't taking those identities into consideration, that everyone was just white, right? And then I'm like, oh, I actually have to give the people who wrote this credit to not just have a terrible 90s pretending like everything's fine understanding of more complicated parts of race and ethnicity.

Yeah. So first of all, shout out to that teacher.

Yeah, no, he fucking changed my life.

Yep.

He was also in all of the John Waters movies.

Oh my God, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, he was just like a background character, like the young Black man who like, actually, I don't want to talk to myself and tell you exactly who my English teacher was. But yeah, no, that man lived a strange life. But then he finally succeeded in his dream of becoming an English teacher. Anyway.

I do think that there's a lot. I mean, there's probably a lot of like well-meaning leftist types who still think that you know, the only kind of solidarity is class solidarity. As important as that is, race is real. And like, you don't get to understanding, like genuine, meaningful understanding by pretending that it's not. And I think that like the 90s did present this idea that the objective was a colorblind society. And I think that this episode is so layered and thoughtful and sort of depicting the complexities of people's identity. I love the sort of Black women, Jewish kind of solidarity that's sort of quietly at play in the backdrop of this episode.

Well, it turns out that it's really easy to look at an episode like this for longer than the period of time that we have to look at it in only one episode. So this is now two weeks of content. So you're going to have to wait, everyone, for another week to hear even more about it. But if you haven't had a chance to watch the show yet, Now's the chance to go catch up and watch it. But in the meantime, if you can't wait and you want to hear more about what Bridget Todd has to say about things, Bridget, is there any way that people can do that?

There sure is. I happen to have an audio book out called Love at First Prompt. Hell yeah. You also have a podcast about it.

Every single time I mention your podcast, my brain is incapable of not making the joke that it's an untrue statement. But you have a podcast called There's No Girls on the Internet.

That is true. And there are girls on the Internet. We're all around. You know, there's all kinds of folks on the Internet having nerdy conversations. So if you are a sci-fi fan and want to have more nerdy tech and Internet conversations, check it out.

We should start a show called Bitches on the Internet. Bitches on the Internet. I'm sure it'll go over well with everybody.

All right.

That's it for this week. We'll see you all next week.

See you next week. Bye.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening.

CZM Reverse Book Club: Talking "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" with Bridget, Hazel, and All of You

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