[COLUMN] 25 Years On, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Still Has the Perfect Ending | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

At the end of May 1999, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reached its natural conclusion with its seventh season finale, “What You Leave Behind.”

The two-hour event episode was the culmination of an extended serialized arc that had begun with “Penumbra” around half-way through the season, and built to a steady climax. The finale tied off various plot threads that had accrued over the show’s seven-season run. The Dominion War came to an end with the invasion of Cardassia. Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) fulfilled his function as the Emissary of the Prophets in one final clash with Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo).

More than that, the crew that had been together for years all split up and went their separate ways. Sisko becomes one with the Prophets, journeying to the Celestial Temple. The Changeling Odo (Rene Auberjonois) returned home to help his people heal after the war. Garak (Andrew Robinson) pledged to stay behind and rebuild the remains of Cardassia. Chief Miles Edward O’Brien (Colm Meaney) accepted a teaching job on Earth. Worf (Michael Dorn) became the Federation’s Ambassador to the Klingon homeworld, Qo’nos.

It is an actual ending. It is also strangely beautiful. Deep Space Nine becomes a story about the overlap and intersection of all these various lives over an extended period of time, but one that doesn’t last forever. It’s a very mature approach to life, one that understands that relationships come and go, that friends move on and separate, that life carries on. These characters were all hugely important to one another in this chapter of their lives, but chapters end.

Just because the relationship between Odo and Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean that it was meaningless. O’Brien’s farewell to his best friend Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) doesn’t invalidate the role that each played in the other’s life. Worf lost his wife Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), and eventually learned that her symbiont’s next host, Ezri Dax (Nicole DeBoer), is not a replacement, but her own person.

There’s a beautiful line in Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the Vision (Paul Bettany) proclaims “a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” It’s a universal experience. Many people will forge intense and close personal relationships at school, college or work, only to come to the understanding that those relationships don’t last forever, and that doesn’t deprive them of value or importance. “What We Leave Behind” is a beautiful ode to that idea.

“This may be the last time we're all together,” Sisko tells his crew, before he journey to Bajor to confront Dukat, “but no matter what the future holds, no matter how far we travel, a part of us, a very important part, will always remain here on Deep Space Nine.” Incidentally, the sequence also includes much of the production team and many guest stars in the crowd, rendering the statement as metatext. Just as O’Brien, Worf and others moved on, so would the people working on Deep Space Nine - and even the people watching Deep Space Nine.

Of course, Deep Space Nine was not the first Star Trek show to have a finale. The original Star Trek had been unceremoniously cancelled, so it’s not fair to talk about “Turnabout Intruder” as a meaningful end to the series. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country offers a much more satisfying end to the crew’s journey. Similarly, Star Trek: The Next Generation had ended on its own terms with “All Good Things”, one of the best episodes the franchise ever produced.

“All Good Things” is in many ways a better episode than “What You Leave Behind.” In particular, the conflict between Sisko and Dukat in “What You Leave Behind” feels somewhat undercut, particularly given that it comes after the end of the Dominion War and after most of the crew have begun going their separate ways. Deep Space Nine often struggled to incorporate its spiritual themes, particularly in its later seasons, and Sisko’s throwdown with Dukat was more Star Wars than Star Trek.

In contrast, “All Good Things” is just a beautiful piece of television that can be watch on its own terms, even decades removed from The Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself thrown backwards and forwards through time. It’s very like A Christmas Carol, with Picard navigating his past, his present and his future. In that future, the crew of the Enterprise have all split up and gone their separate ways. They have moved on. The Next Generation is over.

It works very well. It’s very emotionally powerful to check in on these old friends decades after they have drifted apart, with Picard seemingly fumbled his relationship with Captain Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) as Admiral William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) harboring resentment towards Worf over their shared love for the now-deceased Counsellor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis). It is a reminder that, as the title implies, all things must reach a natural endpoint.

It is also something of a lie: The Next Generation wasn’t ending. It was transitioning. Indeed, one of the reasons why “All Good Things” couldn’t depict the actual ending of the show. The crew were still filming “All Good Things” when production formally began on the feature film Star Trek: Generations in March 1994. The cast would go on to headline four feature films: Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis. Decades later, they would reunite for the third season of Star Trek: Picard.

Of course, this is the fate of all franchises. Nothing ever ends anymore. There is also more blood to be wrung from the stone, more value to be extracted from the intellectual property through “cultural fracking.” “All Good Things” offers the viewers a tease of a potential future when The Next Generation might possibly be over, but the truth is that the episode remains stuck in a perpetual present. As Q (John DeLancie) boasts, presiding as judge over Picard, “The trial never ends.”

In its original context, this was a clever acknowledgement that The Next Generation seemed likely to live forever in syndication like the original Star Trek. Future generations would watch “All Good Things” on some dreary afternoon, and tune in to see the first season premiere, “Encounter at Farpoint”, the following day. The Next Generation would always exist in a perpetual present through that format, airing in constant rotation.

This was admittedly a source of some frustration to the production team, who couldn’t tell long-form stories because of the constraints of syndication. “The studio wants to be able to syndicate these in any order they want and you are tying the hands of the local stations if they want to run episodes wildly out of sequence,” writer Ronald D. Moore recalls being warned, “we can’t put them a position where they have to run them in a particular sequence, so stop doing it.”

These days, that aspect of “All Good Things” has taken on a different pallor. Q’s observation that the trial never ends feels less like a promise of future generations discovering these classic adventures in perpetual reruns than a threat that nothing is ever allowed to be over. There is always “more.” These characters can never truly grow or change or settle, because they always have to be in a position where they can be brought back to sit on the bridge of the Enterprise again.

In this way, “What You Leave Behind” has perhaps aged a little better than “All Good Things.” It doesn’t offer the vague promise of some potential ending lying in the distant future. It delivers an actual ending on its own terms. “All Good Things” ends with the Enterprise crew gathered around the poker table, as if to suggest that this is how things will always be. In contrast, “What You Leave Behind” ends with the crew of Deep Space Nine scattered across the galaxy.

It is to the credit of Deep Space Nine that the show has largely avoided the sort of ruthless nostalgic exploitation that defines both Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Sure, there was an entire series of novels set after the events of “What You Leave Behind”, and characters from Deep Space Nine have appeared in episodes of Lower Decks like “Hear All, Trust Nothing” and “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”, but those sorts of animated guest appearances are relatively mild as far as nostalgia goes.

The entire cast of The Next Generation, with the notable exception of Denise Crosby, has appeared on Picard, including recurring characters like Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and early departures like Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton). Picard also includes Voyager regulars like Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and Tuvok (Tim Russ), while Voyager veterans like Hologram Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), Captain Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and the EMH (Robert Picardo) appear as fixtures of Prodigy.

There are reasons why Deep Space Nine has not been mined as effectively as The Next Generation and Voyager. Several regular and recurring cast members have passed away, including Rene Auberjonois, Aron Eisenberg and Barry Jenner. Avery Brooks seems to enjoy his privacy, and has made it clear that he does not feel defined by his association with Star Trek. In some ways, it seems like Deep Space Nine is less popular with mainstream audiences than its two immediate siblings.

However, Deep Space Nine also had an inherently challenging relationship to the larger franchise, and so wouldn’t lend itself to such nostalgia comfort food. In the retrospective documentary What We Left Behind, the writers on Deep Space Nine reunited to pitch a hypothetical eighth season of the show. It seems safe to suggest that fans would have had an aneurysm if the revival had opened with the death of beloved character Nog (Eisenberg) on the orders of an organization led by Julian Bashir.

Still, whatever the reasons, there is something oddly appealing in the fact that “What You Leave Behind” is actually and meaningfully an ending to Deep Space Nine, in a way that “All Good Things” is not an ending to The Next Generation or “Endgame” is not an ending to Voyager. At a time when franchises are no longer allowed to actually wrap up, when they exist largely to sell the audience on whatever the next thing might be, a definitive ending is a truly powerful thing.

Sometimes, you actually have to leave things behind.